I've been reading "1491" over the last couple of days, actually! It's very good, and now that I'm reading the "Mammothfail" posts with all of THAT in the back of my head (the massive complexity and diversity of pre-1492 America, the richness of culture and settlement on the Eastern seaboard, and the way that Haudenosaunee ideas on personal liberty probably contributed to the Enlightenment and later women's rights movement) I'm finding Wrede's version of the US not just incredibly unbelievable and problematic, but flat and dull as well. What sort of writer would want to reject all of THAT just to do Little House on the Praire with mammoths? (Not that mammoths aren't cool. But Cahokia with mammoths would be infinitely cooler yet!)

I can understand why someone would want to avoid writing about Amerindians, because I personaly don't find them interesting. I don't find pre-literate societies too interesting. Most of the time I don't even find pre-industrial peoples interesting, whoever they might be, wherever they might be on the globe. My only interest in European medieval society comes from the fact that it had proto-industrial traits which might have led to an early industrial revolution, if the plague hadn't wiped them out in the 14th century. And of course I became interested in early Islamic Science and society when I found out what they did, all the libraires they built before internal religious strife (there were four strong variants, not just the sunni and shia divisions we know today) wrecked everything in the 13th century.

But if you want to avoid Amerindians totally (frankly I'd steer them off to Australia or get them to adopt syllabic writing and industrial farming early, before Colombus, if I wanted to get rid of them as a boring pre-literate bunch) you have to find out more about them. If I wanted to get rid of the boring pre-literate tribes I'd have to learn more about their more advanced replacements, the Hopi and the Inca. But she simply does not want to learn. She's toxic. Those three you linked to defined Wrede's problem for me "research is HAAAAAARD".

Before, I thought that she didn't seem to know how to handle alternate history, as a beginning writer in this field. Maybe she'd catch on later. Now I can clearly see that she really doesn't want to go into history in any possible way, she isn't interested in history, and she wants the strict minimum knowledge (as she defines it) to write her book about shiny magic mammoths. She's exactly the kind of writer who should be kept away from alternate history.

You've nailed the biggest problem with the book's concept: by removing NAs from the picture, I feel she's really saying that she thinks their contributions to society were negligible with no lasting ramifications.

*nodnod*

I totally agree. Really, the more I think about it, the more clear it becomes that this book's concept is coming from an incredibly privileged place -- and I don't mean privileged in a good way.

Though you make good points, you don't even have to go that far forward for the major changes to kick in. Look at the short and inglorious history of Norse settlement in the New World -- the factors that enabled European colonists to settle in New England were *pivotally* dependent upon help from the locals. Basically they survived those early days by raiding disease-decimated villages, and by adopting local agriculture. Their own crops, bred in a different climate, didn't grow well at all. They didn't know which foods were edible. One of the more controversial theses of "1491" is that even the so-called "wild" food sources (nuts and berries) were heavily cultivated and selected for by the Native Americans who were living there before -- what the early colonists mistook for wilderness was actually a heavily-modified semi-cultivated environment (orchards, basically). Even if he's only partly correct, Europeans vs. True Wilderness would still have been a very clear-cut Wilderness 1, Europeans 0. They could probably have done it eventually, just as earlier human ancestors have colonized uninhabited lands throughout prehistory, but they would have done it as their early ancestors did -- very very slowly, over centuries or thousands of years, having to learn to adapt to the new land as they went along.

And this is a version of America that's even less hospitable than the one we know, because she has previous settlers on the Pacific side of things getting "eaten" when they land.

The idea that 19th century America would look ANYTHING like our own under these circumstances is just ridiculous.

Which makes you wonder -- would there ever have been an Enlightenment and American democracy as we know it?

You know, especially after reading 1491, I'm leaning more strongly in a "not" direction -- at least not as we experienced it, anyway. Not to say that *nothing* of that sort would have happened/be happening (there were a lot of factors that went into it, and I don't pretend to understand all of them; and Iceland had representative democracy long before Columbus) but it certainly wouldn't look like what we had.

For one thing, I think you can pretty much guarantee no American revolution (even leaving aside the political implications of not having the Haudenosaunee and others nearby, the colonies just wouldn't have the population, and they'd be too dependent on the mother country), hence no French revolution (which was inspired by ours), and I think it's a given that Europe in the 1800s would have very little democracy of any sort. American *at best* would still be a colony (and more realistically would probably be mostly wilderness with a very tiny population). Wow, the more I think about this, the more it spirals outwards, because no Spanish and Portuguese colonies in South America would mean a much reduced Spain and Portugal -- in fact, I sort of gather that this is a world without much colonization and slavery at all (based on what she's said about Asia and Africa having their own magic, and Africa colonizing South America), which would lead to a radically different world map and a Europe that was hugely less influential than in our world.

Adding a p.s. since I can't edit comments -- I'm definitely going to have to look for that book! :D I've heard good things about it from several sources, but especially after this whole debacle, I'm thinking that I really need a good mainstream-history debunking.

I don't know, the quote about Native American's prepping the land for human occupation was pretty damn head-desky. Seriously, human occupation. WTF?

And what the hell is wrong with Bujold that she can't shut up? Is she afraid someone's going to notice that her future is rather disturbingly white (something I'd never have noticed if she'd kept her mouth shut)?

If I ever become a published writer, I'm staying the hell out of these kinds of discussions. They're something you listen to if you're white - not something you participate in. (Unless you're the author who screwed up, of course. Then apologies are in order.)

I've been reading that she and Wrede are friends in real life...

That's probably it, but... If your friend steps on someone's foot and decides to ignore it or insist that their foot shouldn't have been there...you shouldn't add to the problem by also insisting that their foot shouldn't have been there. I mean, really.

Sometimes I think it's a good thing that I don't expect to actually like any of the authors I read. *sigh*

...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...

...by eliminating an entire people. Because doing a little research and writing First Nations people AS people is clearly ZOMG too fucking hard. So I am going to cure the disease of shallow stereotyped representations by killing the patient and not representing them at all.

Dammit. Just... dammit.

Are you still planning to read the book? I'm really interested in your take on it.

Thanks for the book recs!

I'm in "Lies My Teacher told Me"! Well, sort of....The chapter where he talks about the 54th/Shaw Memorial, he mentions that every time he went down to see it, there was always frsh flowers on it. That was my friend and me. All throughout college we did that. It got hard getting into Boston was because of full time jobs, but we try and place flowers on the anniversary of Ft Wagner.

Er...I hate to mention this, but it's Gehayi with an E.

Thanks!

Oh, and here's James Loewen's website:

http://www.uvm.edu/~jloewen/

While you're pushing books, this post on 50books_poc is a collection of POC-authored books that were rec'd as antidotes to this crap that Wrede has spawned.

Even without the major ramifications (but even moreso with them), I'm struck by what a childish and amateurish attitude caused this problem. "I don't have to research history because I'm doing an alternate." That's a mistake you usually only see if very young, very inexperienced writers. Writing alternate history, an author needs a better than normal understanding of history; they need to understand it well enough to logically predict what would happen if key factors were missing.

A popular hypothetical: what if the South won the civil war? Well, would the government of England re-establish trade over the massive protests of her people? Would it cause a revolution if they did? If they don't, how does the South recover from a near-ruined economy when they're still unable to sell their major export? Do they abolish slavery anyway to re-establish trade with what they have? Do they establish their own industries?

A world without Native Americans, you gotta consider the major implications. As others have said, the difficulty or even impossibility of settling a truly wild frontier in such a short time, and the effect on the Enlightenment. Without Native American slaves to mine gold, Spain doesn't get their massive quantities which completely upsets the power structure in Europe, which means England never builds their famed Armada and the entire British Empire never happens. Even is America is settled and does become independent, what does eliminate the largest and longest-running war in our history do to our military prowess, and thus every conflict we've been in changes. Does Mexico now kick our ass and own most of the Southwest?

If a writer's going to make that big of a change, they need to understand that they're making that big of a change, and they need to make that big of a change. "Everything's the same except--" No, that's a very childish mistake.

Well, I can give it a try. My local library district doesn't have it and I don't know if the sister district will let me put a hold on it. Also, I'm not a big fantasy person, so I don't know if I'll make it.

I think you're selling yourself short, though. I don't know that much more about history; I just have a big mouth. My knowledge comes from Lies My Teacher Told Me, bits and pieces picked up from historical costuming research, and in the case of American gold->Spanish Armada->British Navy, watching the old movie "The Sea Hawk."

Isn't that sad commentary on our education system? They make us memorize all these dates and names, but nothing ever really causes anything else in a history class. It all just sort of happens. It took watching a crappy movie from 1940 that can't even figure out what decade it's set in to draw the connection that oh! Bringing in massive amounts of gold from the Americas allowed Spain to completely upset what had been relatively stable balance of powers, and that made England, which was a relatively rich country, started thinking "you know, I bet we are juicy and would taste good with ketchup. Maybe we should do something about that."
You listen to my old teachers, Spain just sort of found a fleet in its harbor some day, and by coincidence about the same time Brits went "Hey, I just realized we have a bunch of trees. We should do something with those. I like boats. Wanna build some boats?"

Sorry, I just went and got all nerdy all over your journal. ;)

OMG, I had to give up about 100 pages from the ending. I just couldn't take it anymore!!! It was better than I expected...but still not very good.

Hee. Tell me about it. I totally didn't catch that either. >_o

Just had to say that I enjoyed reading this discussion.

Educational.

ciao,
Obi