There isn't enough facepalm in the New or Old Worlds

Meta
Title:	There isn't enough facepalm in the New or Old Worlds
Creator:	sabinelagrande
Date(s):	May 11, 2009
Medium:	LiveJournal post
Fandom:
Topic:	Fandom racism, Racefail, Patricia Wrede
External Links:	http://sabinelagrande.livejournal.com/195955.html (offline, accessed November 25, 2015)
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There isn't enough facepalm in the New or Old Worlds is a 2009 meta essay by sabinelagrande that critiques the decision by Patricia Wrede, a white American fantasy author, to omit Native Americans from her upcoming book The Thirteenth Child.

The essay was published in the midst of the ongoing Racefail ‘09 debates and controversy, a fact that the author references in the opening paragraphs. The decision by Wrede to omit Native Americans from The Thirteenth Child was a spark that reignited the debates, and the ensuing discussions are often referred to as MammothFail.

For further context on the RaceFail debates and discussions, refer to RaceFail '09.

Excerpts from the Essay

I 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:

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 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.

Comments

[zhukora1]
I'm definitely lifting my glass bottle pitcher to this post.

I would comment more thoroughly, but idiot racism in fannish affairs has been hashed out a lot in my flist lately and now it just makes me sleepy. Cheers, though.

[zhukora1]
I'm, like, months past being clever or relevant, probably. Usually I put my head under my pillow and go "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER GIDDENS", but, y'know, I figured I'd wade in for once.

[zhukora1]
Nah, it's all good. I think I get the bulk of my ragey rage from asian_outrage which is a fun comm, but emotionally exhausting, and not terribly focused on Indian issues. My last few weeks have been full of racism wank about Joss Whedon and the Avatar: The Last Airbender movie, but this one I hadn't heard of. I went browsing through the comments in that post you linked, and I'm getting more ragey all the time. The more I learn about the plot and premise of the book, the more it sounds like a Bad Plan.

I think you tackled it well. Maybe someday when you're feeling drunk and rambly and have a bit of time on your hands you could elaborate on that identity stuff some more. It's refreshing to hear an actual anthropologist talk about it instead of just random people on the internet who CAN HAS OPINIONS.

[doro_chan]
So in other words, she was looking for the easy way out. There would have been multiple possibilities to have megafauna and magic and Indians that probably would have worked better for everyone, but she just didn't want to deal with incorporating Indians into her story.

I don't think she really thought this through at all (I can come up with quite a few flaws in her Bering Strait blocking theory and I know next to nothing about the subject). If she had, I think she would have preferred writing about Indians. And maybe without using the two stereotypes she hates so much. It can't be that hard not to use one, can it?

[sabinelagrande]

The thing that gets me, too, is that if she'd bothered to dip a toe into the literature at all, she'd see that this supposed "Indians-as-gentle-ecologists viewpoint" hasn't been popular since, like, 1970. We're a little caught up in the Indians-as-human-fucking-beings viewpoint in anthropology these days.

And I can't believe nobody sat her down and said, "Uh, Pat? Have you thought about this? Like, really? For more than five minutes?"

It's just so lazy I can't even fathom it.