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sabinelagrandeI feel a little hypocritical weighing in on Racefail: The Colonialism Remix when I kept my mouth shut through the original Racefail. It was mostly because I didn't have anything intelligent to say, and because I was up to my ass in Bourdieu at the time.
But I find I have rather a lot to say this time around.
For those of you who aren't familiar, Patricia Wrede wrote a book called The Thirteenth Child, and, well, I'll just quote the same thing everybody's quoting:
No, really, she actually said that. Like, right on the internet in front of god and everybody. She sat down at the computer and typed that, probably read back over it to see if she misspelled anything, hit send, the whole bit.
I have debated how to present my thoughts on this, because I'm afraid that the next three paragraphs come off as me trying to establish my cred. That's not my intention; thinking about all of this has led me to ruminate on my own identity, which has always been a question of some doubt, and the things in my past that've biased me (there are a lot of them). So mostly, I'm just thinking aloud here; feel free to skip down if you only came to read about the present issue.
I got my degree in anthropology from a school that specializes in Southeastern Indians*, where tribal governments were talked about like stumbling blocks to science; then I turned right around and worked for the National Park Service, where we didn't blow our noses without consulting the Tribes**. I've railed against NAGPRA and helped uphold ARPA. I've worked at a park that was absolutely steeped in Indian history, where it was everywhere you looked and permeated everything, where I was the go to person for presenting and interpreting it***. I've also been to others where the tradition was just as rich, but the material traces had been systematically erased (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK). I can't even begin to describe how blessed it made me feel to help people find their Indian ancestors in our archives, or how heartbroken I felt knowing that I was never going to be able to find mine, or how ridiculous I felt not being able to give people information just because they weren't affiliated with the Tribes. I have seen behavior so impossibly dumbassed, from people of just about every color, that I have wondered how we as a species ever made it down from the trees.
On a more personal level, I'm the descendant of Indians who cut ties to their people and passed for white. That's something I've struggled with ever since I turned, like, fourteen and realized that I was just never going to know what it meant to be Indian. There's this whole section of my past, my blood that I'm always going to be cut off from. I don't even know how to feel about it- are my family victims of government policies which, to this day, hide Indians who aren't affiliated with these reified, Contact-era tribes and erase how indigenous we all are; or are we complicit in the oppression of our own kin? Did we pull one over on the white man, or are we no better than he is? After all this time, are we him? And I know that being able to pick up and put down ethnic affiliations is just another kind of privilege; it's a no-risk proposition for me to call myself Indian, because other people are always going to think of me as white. And I know that I'll never really get it, because I know how much it changes your life to have an identity that you can't shake; ask me about my absolutely laughable attempts to pass for straight.
I know that at the end of the day I'm just like every other white person who considers herself “enlightened”- searching for something to be other than white, because being white and American just isn't something I can be proud of.
[[There was another comment here, but after discussion with![[info]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_other.png)
naraht I've redacted it. Maybe I'll catch a wild hair and write a nice long rant about the misrepresentation and appropriation of Southern culture. But not today.]]
What I'm trying to get at, here, is that no matter my messy relationship to the tribal system and the questionable nature of my heritage, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fiction_theory so eloquently put it, I don't exist in that world. Me, my mother, her mother, the whole maternal line of my family- we're just gone in the world of The Thirteenth Child. Naturally, I have a little problem with that.
So that's part of it.
I admittedly haven't read everybody else's posts on the book; I'm sort of spotcheckingnaraht's excellent list of links. But from what I've seen, people have pretty much covered how America isn't America without the American Indians, and how the argument that megafauna couldn't have survived as long as the Indians were around is so fucking stupid that it doesn't even merit explaining how fucking stupid it is. I wanted to get my thoughts out before I absorbed everybody else's, which will almost necessarily lead to me recapitulating what other people've said. That said, here's the other half of it, that I haven't seen yet:
Europe isn't Europe without the American Indians.
And the peoples of the Pacific, and the peoples of India and Asia and Africa and everywhere else- but let's stick with the present topic. Our destinies have been inextricably linked ever since Contact. Without Contact, throw away your Defoe and kiss Shakespeare goodbye. Forget about Italian food or chocolate. Don't even get me started on the relationship between syphilis and Contact and its place in the Western canon (no, really, don't, I'm actually really horrible at historical epidemiology).
Yeah, you could write about world history without Contact, but you might as well be writing about a magical fantasy land where people walk on their hands and dogs can talk, because it would be nothing like the world we know. Not “wildly divergent”? Are you fucking shitting me? Try not even the same goddamned planet.
I do have a problem with arguments like this one, because I don't believe that what he's saying follows logically from the argument at hand. To my knowledge, no sane person believes that D&D takes place in the real world. I don't think it's problematic to posit a fantasy world with no indigenous occupants- lazy writing, sure, but not essentially harmful. It's just as fantastic and unlikely as a world where dragons exist or birds wear chinos; and creating a land that really was a blank slate wouldn't make its conquerors better people- just different ones, who would probably be bastards in completely new and unexpected ways, with an entirely different set of people to call them out on it.
The problem is that that land does not and cannot exist on Earth. There is no land that is not a palimpsest. We are all historically bounded creatures. We yearn to have a history, and we yearn for that history to be represented. And if you're going to bother representing it at all, fucking at least try to do it right. Don't erase an entire group of peoples because you're too goddamn lazy or uncomfortable to include them, and at least pretend like you realize that you're fucking up world history in general if you do. If you don't want to make the effort, GTFO my planet and write about your own.
* Yes, I use the term American Indians. Yes, it's problematic, but 1) “Native Americans” is even more problematic, being an empty term that smacks of erasure and homogenization; 2) it's the preferred term in the anthropological literature; 3) the Indians that I know personally prefer to be called Indians. YMMV.
** I can't really say which ones, because, y'know, I might actually want to work for the NPS again some day.
*** Yes, I know, white girl talking for the Indians, highly problematic. In my own defense, byzantine NPS hiring procedures and the fact that none of them applied (not an excuse, but a symptom of larger issues) precluded having a member of the Tribes on staff. I consulted the Tribes, tried my damnedest, was lead researcher, have a degree in this stuff, fully recognize that I probably fucked it up anyway, etc, etc.
On a completely separate, but tangentially related issue:
arymabeth: there's nothing wrong with a black woman sounding black, dammit
arymabeth: to force otherwise would be racist
arymabeth: (so is Rachel Luttrel's wig, in my opinion. watching some season 1 eps)
sabinelagrande: (her wig is racist?)
sabinelagrande: (I mean, it's ugly as hell)
arymabeth: (yes. because it is ugly and her hair is gorgeous. I declare the wig racist.)
sabinelagrande: (.....I wish I could draw, so i could depict the wig sitting on her head during rehearsals and making racist remarks)
arymabeth: (I would buy you a million lizards.)
sabinelagrande: (and even Flanigan's hair is like, "Dude [cause obvs. his hair sounds like a surfer], you need to, like, chill with that")
arymabeth: (damn straight)
But I find I have rather a lot to say this time around.
For those of you who aren't familiar, Patricia Wrede wrote a book called The Thirteenth Child, and, well, I'll just quote the same thing everybody's quoting:
The *plan* is for it to be a "settling the frontier" book, only without Indians (because I really hate both the older Indians-as-savages viewpoint that was common in that sort of book, *and* the modern Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint that seems to be so popular lately, and this seems the best way of eliminating the problem, plus it'll let me play with all sorts of cool megafauna). I'm not looking for wildly divergent history, because if it goes too far afield I won't get the right feel. Not that it'll be all that similar anyway; no writing plan survives contact with the characters, and it's already starting to morph.
No, really, she actually said that. Like, right on the internet in front of god and everybody. She sat down at the computer and typed that, probably read back over it to see if she misspelled anything, hit send, the whole bit.
I have debated how to present my thoughts on this, because I'm afraid that the next three paragraphs come off as me trying to establish my cred. That's not my intention; thinking about all of this has led me to ruminate on my own identity, which has always been a question of some doubt, and the things in my past that've biased me (there are a lot of them). So mostly, I'm just thinking aloud here; feel free to skip down if you only came to read about the present issue.
I got my degree in anthropology from a school that specializes in Southeastern Indians*, where tribal governments were talked about like stumbling blocks to science; then I turned right around and worked for the National Park Service, where we didn't blow our noses without consulting the Tribes**. I've railed against NAGPRA and helped uphold ARPA. I've worked at a park that was absolutely steeped in Indian history, where it was everywhere you looked and permeated everything, where I was the go to person for presenting and interpreting it***. I've also been to others where the tradition was just as rich, but the material traces had been systematically erased (I'M LOOKING AT YOU, CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK). I can't even begin to describe how blessed it made me feel to help people find their Indian ancestors in our archives, or how heartbroken I felt knowing that I was never going to be able to find mine, or how ridiculous I felt not being able to give people information just because they weren't affiliated with the Tribes. I have seen behavior so impossibly dumbassed, from people of just about every color, that I have wondered how we as a species ever made it down from the trees.
On a more personal level, I'm the descendant of Indians who cut ties to their people and passed for white. That's something I've struggled with ever since I turned, like, fourteen and realized that I was just never going to know what it meant to be Indian. There's this whole section of my past, my blood that I'm always going to be cut off from. I don't even know how to feel about it- are my family victims of government policies which, to this day, hide Indians who aren't affiliated with these reified, Contact-era tribes and erase how indigenous we all are; or are we complicit in the oppression of our own kin? Did we pull one over on the white man, or are we no better than he is? After all this time, are we him? And I know that being able to pick up and put down ethnic affiliations is just another kind of privilege; it's a no-risk proposition for me to call myself Indian, because other people are always going to think of me as white. And I know that I'll never really get it, because I know how much it changes your life to have an identity that you can't shake; ask me about my absolutely laughable attempts to pass for straight.
I know that at the end of the day I'm just like every other white person who considers herself “enlightened”- searching for something to be other than white, because being white and American just isn't something I can be proud of.
[[There was another comment here, but after discussion with
naraht I've redacted it. Maybe I'll catch a wild hair and write a nice long rant about the misrepresentation and appropriation of Southern culture. But not today.]]What I'm trying to get at, here, is that no matter my messy relationship to the tribal system and the questionable nature of my heritage, as
fiction_theory so eloquently put it, I don't exist in that world. Me, my mother, her mother, the whole maternal line of my family- we're just gone in the world of The Thirteenth Child. Naturally, I have a little problem with that. So that's part of it.
I admittedly haven't read everybody else's posts on the book; I'm sort of spotchecking
naraht's excellent list of links. But from what I've seen, people have pretty much covered how America isn't America without the American Indians, and how the argument that megafauna couldn't have survived as long as the Indians were around is so fucking stupid that it doesn't even merit explaining how fucking stupid it is. I wanted to get my thoughts out before I absorbed everybody else's, which will almost necessarily lead to me recapitulating what other people've said. That said, here's the other half of it, that I haven't seen yet:Europe isn't Europe without the American Indians.
And the peoples of the Pacific, and the peoples of India and Asia and Africa and everywhere else- but let's stick with the present topic. Our destinies have been inextricably linked ever since Contact. Without Contact, throw away your Defoe and kiss Shakespeare goodbye. Forget about Italian food or chocolate. Don't even get me started on the relationship between syphilis and Contact and its place in the Western canon (no, really, don't, I'm actually really horrible at historical epidemiology).
Yeah, you could write about world history without Contact, but you might as well be writing about a magical fantasy land where people walk on their hands and dogs can talk, because it would be nothing like the world we know. Not “wildly divergent”? Are you fucking shitting me? Try not even the same goddamned planet.
I do have a problem with arguments like this one, because I don't believe that what he's saying follows logically from the argument at hand. To my knowledge, no sane person believes that D&D takes place in the real world. I don't think it's problematic to posit a fantasy world with no indigenous occupants- lazy writing, sure, but not essentially harmful. It's just as fantastic and unlikely as a world where dragons exist or birds wear chinos; and creating a land that really was a blank slate wouldn't make its conquerors better people- just different ones, who would probably be bastards in completely new and unexpected ways, with an entirely different set of people to call them out on it.
The problem is that that land does not and cannot exist on Earth. There is no land that is not a palimpsest. We are all historically bounded creatures. We yearn to have a history, and we yearn for that history to be represented. And if you're going to bother representing it at all, fucking at least try to do it right. Don't erase an entire group of peoples because you're too goddamn lazy or uncomfortable to include them, and at least pretend like you realize that you're fucking up world history in general if you do. If you don't want to make the effort, GTFO my planet and write about your own.
* Yes, I use the term American Indians. Yes, it's problematic, but 1) “Native Americans” is even more problematic, being an empty term that smacks of erasure and homogenization; 2) it's the preferred term in the anthropological literature; 3) the Indians that I know personally prefer to be called Indians. YMMV.
** I can't really say which ones, because, y'know, I might actually want to work for the NPS again some day.
*** Yes, I know, white girl talking for the Indians, highly problematic. In my own defense, byzantine NPS hiring procedures and the fact that none of them applied (not an excuse, but a symptom of larger issues) precluded having a member of the Tribes on staff. I consulted the Tribes, tried my damnedest, was lead researcher, have a degree in this stuff, fully recognize that I probably fucked it up anyway, etc, etc.
On a completely separate, but tangentially related issue:
arymabeth: there's nothing wrong with a black woman sounding black, dammitarymabeth: to force otherwise would be racistarymabeth: (so is Rachel Luttrel's wig, in my opinion. watching some season 1 eps)sabinelagrande: (her wig is racist?)sabinelagrande: (I mean, it's ugly as hell)arymabeth: (yes. because it is ugly and her hair is gorgeous. I declare the wig racist.)sabinelagrande: (.....I wish I could draw, so i could depict the wig sitting on her head during rehearsals and making racist remarks)arymabeth: (I would buy you a million lizards.)sabinelagrande: (and even Flanigan's hair is like, "Dude [cause obvs. his hair sounds like a surfer], you need to, like, chill with that")arymabeth: (damn straight)
