unspeakable horror
I've not read Patricia C. Wrede's Thirteenth Child, and I don't think I will.
According to Jo Walton writing over at Tor, it's "Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic," apparently. Which sounds awesome, and something I'd love to read. Only, one of its basic premises posits an alternate America ("Columbia") that's empty, where the ( Read more... )
According to Jo Walton writing over at Tor, it's "Little House on the Prairie with mammoths and magic," apparently. Which sounds awesome, and something I'd love to read. Only, one of its basic premises posits an alternate America ("Columbia") that's empty, where the ( Read more... )
From what I've read in Walton's review, I think Wrede's book slots neatly into a narrative tradition, a series of lies, that claims that "Human life wasn't native to the Americas AND Native life wasn't human."
The idea that the first people of the now colonized Americas were dangerous, wild, powerful, primitive animals that walked on two legs instead of four is very much a part of European narrative traditions.
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However, the problem I have hear is tied to your first point--that the Americas were empty, and thus, it's okay to have colonized them, when in fact they weren't, and it wasn't.
The Thirteenth Child elides the issue by making sure that the paleo-Indians never make it to the Americas, leaving it blessedly free for "Avropan" and "Aphrikan" colonization and skirting the moral and ethical dilemmas of colonization for its characters.
Which means the author has to take the full weight of them. I opine that by erasing the Native Americans (if the paleo-Indians don't make it across Beringia, there will never be any Iroquois, Maya, Pueblo, or Inca) from the narrative, the author participates in the cultural eradication of the Native peoples.
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I'm right with you on that.
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Yes. Both parts. And because commenters on this post are clearly getting the first part, I especially want to second the second one.
My first thought on reading the book's description was, "Oh, god, they've gone all the way. Instead of just making Indians into New World elves -- wild, free, mystical, see-sawing between the roles of "magical helper elves" and "will capriciously turn on you for no reason other than they're inherent and dangerous antipathy to proper humans" -- this book went so far as to make Indians over into dragons. Magical wild animals instead of magical wild people."
hermetic, you may be more sensitized to the one false narrative than the other, but the inclusion of dragons (which are often sentient or quasi-sentient, riding the gray area between human and animal) reads strongly of the colonialist narrative that Indians were magical, dangerous, quasi-sentient animals. Dragons may seem like a random, innocuous artifact of this book being ( ... )
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That's similar to where I went too. Made me sick. It's a repeat of the 'solution' to the 'Indian problem'.
Dragons may seem like a random, innocuous artifact of this book being published within the fantasy genre, but it does tie very closely with one of the dominant colonialist narratives about who Indians were. Particularly when various body parts of Indians are used as talismans and trophies to this day. White people and robbing Indian graves has been going on at least since, what, '76 in the US? I'm told there's even a bit in one of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books where young Laura sees an Indian baby and pitches a tantrum ( ... )
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