Genocide by removal from land

[aquaeri]

One of the points I've now seen raised once too often in the Thirteenth Child MammothFail is that you can't call it genocide to prevent Native Americans' ancestors even arriving in the Americas in the first place. The people are still alive, just somewhere else! They haven't been killed

Comments

[xiphias]

It's also because "genocide", by some definitions, need not involve any homicide. It's the destruction of a culture and an ethnicity. Preventing the culture and ethnicity from ever forming destroys the γένος -- the "genos."

[aquaeri]

Yes, I think that's a related/overlapping issue. It seems to me there are a lot of privileged white people who are so oblivious to their own culture and ethnicity that they have no idea what giving that up would mean. Or just think "I'd never survive dumped in wild savage place and scream until they took me home".

[cakmpls]

Suppose someone wrote an alternative history in which the people we know as Europeans had never left Africa. Would that be a genocide of the "white" race?

[zeborahnz]

Yes; but one of no consequence, because it's hard to go a waking minute without being forcibly reminded that we did leave Africa. There are few such reminders of the existence of Native Americans and Aborigines, and in fact a lot of things contribute to erasing what reminders remain.

[joycemocha]

It depends upon where you live in the US.

I live in one county with a Native American name and work in a second county with a Native American name. While the names of the towns and cities I work in are European, the origins of the counties are Native. Depending upon the season, I can buy fresh-caught salmon from Native Americans. I see advertisements for local casinos operated by Native Americans. Native Americans are exercising a growing strength in political discussions in my region.

This is not equally true of many places within the US.

[aquaeri]

I live on a street with an Indigenous name, in a suburb also with an Indigenous name. To the best of my research so far, the names come from two different Indigenous languages, neither of which would have been spoken anywhere remotely within coo-ee of here, if you'll pardon the Australianism (because it seems appropriate). And that's unfortunately a fairly typical state of affairs wrt to "nice white suburbia"'s attitude to Indigenous Australians if they're not out and out racist.

[joycemocha]

Over on my LJ I've been putting forth pieces of an argument based on an Ecocritism literary perspective, which is that Thirteenth Child cannot be considered an Americana/pioneer/frontier fantasy because it fails to establish the sense of place which marks works of that type. It fits a "Lost Continent" model instead, and even then, it's European in style and approach

[aquaeri]

Absolutely. I've also tried to figure out what North America might remotely have been in 1491 without humans and I can't. I agree, it wouldn't be remotely like what it was, and I don't think there's any real way it could be anything like what it is now. 500 years is just not enough to "compensate" for the differences.

It's not so much that trying to imagine it makes my brain hurt, it's the fact that there are so many white people who clearly don't think it would be a big deal that it can support entire books like Thirteenth Child.

[heleninwales]

it fails to establish the sense of place which marks works of that type.

That was one of my gripes with the book. It's a pity that Patricia didn't go the whole hog and opt for a real Lost Continent -- an Atlantis that never sank or something -- because I don't feel that the ecology is convincing at all. By removing the native people, the land lost all its flavour and the incomers are Generic European, which in real life just doesn't exist. They would have come with their own cultural baggage from whatever country they'd emigrated from.

[aquaeri]

I haven't read it, but my feeling was that Pat Wrede needed to file a lot more of the "North America settled by white pioneers" serial numbers off her story. That sounds similar to what you're describing here.