Hello, internets!

[sholio]

I have not been around much lately; work + social life/volunteerism + writing fiction has stolen all my online time and most of my energy. (Woe!) And it doesn't help that my workplace has tightened its rules on blogging, so I can't pop in and check LJ during the day. Hopefully things will lighten up soon.

Hmm, what's going on these days ...

1. sga_genficathon is humming along nicely. I am thrilled to be able to sit back this year and watch stories magically appear, with just a few very minor snags to iron out and/or author requests to fix formatting errors, etc. I am still way, way behind on reading, but I am really impressed with the variety of stories, styles and subjects available to read -- The Choices That Damn Us deserves way more comments than it's gotten (a chilling, believable, Teyla-centric AU that depicts a very plausible direction in which the Stargate Program could have gone). On a much more cheerful note (yes, I am counting apocafic as "more cheerful") Where the White Lillies Grow is a long and very enjoyable, John & Rodney-centric story of two clashing AUs, one in which a series of Years Without a Summer in the 1800s wiped out most of civilization on Earth, and another in which a darker Atlantis expedition never regained contact with Earth. A malfunctioning Stargate causes them to collide ...

2. Switching to serious RL stuff, Tor Books does it again with a YA fantasy about a magical USA in which the continent is conveniently empty of inhabitants when the Europeans arrive. This is not, in the book, presented as a terrible tragedy or a reason to explore a necessarily very different America; instead it's an excuse for a light-hearted romp with mammoths and covered wagons in an America that (in defiance of logic, reason or morality) is pretty much the same as the one we know except for the no-pesky-indigenous-people thing. Then Lois McMaster Bujold, whose books I like very much, gets involved in the comments and makes everything so very much worse. *headdesk* Due to the whole lack-of-time thing, I haven't read more than a random smattering of posts on this, but naraht has link roundups. (How do you make the LJ-user code work for Dreamwidth accounts? Cannot figure it out. Brain is very limp and floppy tonight.)

Comments

[sholio]

She didn't write a history in which everything is unaffected by the loss of the Native Americans. She wrote a history in which she left out Native Americans but otherwise didn't make many changes. That's less a concerted effort to write them out and say they weren't important as just flip a single switch to support a single concept, namely megafauna.

... um, I can't figure out what your argument is here, honestly. Aren't those the same thing? If she removes one factor and leaves all else the same, doesn't that imply very heavily that the factor she removed is, at least by her, considered irrelevant? Either that, or it implies that she's such a poor or lazy writer she can't be bothered to do simple fact-checking for a book. Neither one of which is very complimentary to the writer, but honestly, when you've got a situation where a bunch of people are pointing out something in a book that they find offensive, those are basically the options -- that the writer is ignorant enough about the situation to have written something heavily offensive by accident, or that they don't care and/or believe what they wrote.

Clearly no one is saying that she's a terrible person, but, as a writer, she *has* caused offense to a segment of her audience (and Bujold's compounded the problem).

In terms of what she's done wrong as an author, my attitude is that she's really taken away something that's extremely important to Americana. There's this weird mutant thing in my head that I think of when I think of the history and fiction of America itself, and Native Americans are a big part of that. But them being gone does not, to me, equate with the giant blindspot that historical and educational materials have created

Well, not really a mutant thing at all, I think; I would have thought it was pretty much indisputable that the history of the Americas is intrinsically bound up with the people who were here first, who shaped the colonizers' settlement patterns and are still here in greatly reduced numbers.

Erasing them for a work of light fantasy is not, of course, an act on a par with physically wiping them off the map, or removing them from history books -- but IMHO, it's not entirely removed; it's part of the same continuum, just as the absence of black characters in leading roles on TV is part of a continuum that includes discriminatory hiring and lending practices, Jim Crow laws and so forth -- one small part (but definitely a part) of a narrative that says "We don't want you here" and "Mainstream=/=you". (The caveat here is that I'm very much a white girl, so I'm looking at this from the outside and feel a bit weird taking an expert tone on it. Of course, like most modern Americans I'm also a blend of several races and cultures if you go far enough back. I look white, culturally identify white, basically am white in every way that counts, and there is no way I can claim Native heritage without being hideously co-optive, which means it's totally irrelevant to these discussions -- but on a strictly personal level, my ~1/16 Choctaw self would not exist in Wrede's 'verse because my great-grandparents would have been on different continents, and it's hard to avoid thinking about that too.)

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

... um, I can't figure out what your argument is here, honestly. Aren't those the same thing?

Very nearly so, yes. I'm making a very subtle distinction in the idea that you can do at least two things here. On the one hand, you can remove Native Americans because you think they're irrelevant, or at least make the point that they're irrelevant. On the other hand, you can remove Native Americans because they're an obstacle to your story, without any intent what so ever as to casting them as irrelevant. In the former, you're making a pretty slimy argument. In the latter, you're being ignorant of what that does to your world's internal consistency. Both will still offend, but I think they're slightly different things.

Well, not really a mutant thing at all, I think;

Sorry, I should've elaborated, I mean mutant as in my head is full of cowboys and oregon trail people and native americans and mad frenchmen and The Dark Tower and Josey Wales and all that. With John Wayne standing overwatch and Wes Studi being a total jerk somewhere in the background.

And yeah, I agree with you on the continuum idea.

My personal background is very mutt like, but it's all european/scandy mutt. Sometimes I wonder if someone's going to yell at me for having my opinions and being white.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I forgot to mention, intent somehow plays into my moral philosophy, whence why the distinction between those two concepts is important in my head. I don't really know how my own moral system works, I haven't finished translating it from emotions to concepts yet.