you don't have to turn Native Americans into megafauna to make them disappear

[edenfalling]

I was reading a fanfiction story* a couple days ago. I enjoyed it; it's well-written and atmospheric, with some intriguing world-building, fun character interaction, and a conclusion that wraps up the immediate plot arc while leaving space for potential further adventures. But an issue that has bugged me off and on about alternate histories (and specifically magical/paranormal alternate histories) for a while now finally jumped up and refused to be dismissed anymore.

Namely, America.

If you are changing history such that magic or psychic powers or other forms of the supernatural have always existed, then why does European conquest and colonization of the Americas still happen so often? Yes, you can handwave that the Europeans still develop technology and particular forms of social organization that give them a leg up on the rest of the world, but if there is magic, that will tend to change and even the playing field. And therefore, why does North America still end up with the same ethnic mixture it has in our world? Why is such a massive demographic and cultural change taken as a given?

What is wrong with writing about Native Americans in America?

I think the issue jumped out at me from this particular story more strongly than usual because it posited a world that mirrored ours until the mid-1500s -- whereupon there was a massive paranormal incursion and things went semi-apocalyptically sideways. So Spanish and Portuguese colonization was already ongoing, but northern European colonization of North America hadn't started. Yet somehow the story still had North America inhabited by English-speaking white people with a few black people. There were obvious equivalents to several cities in the United States, with clearly European-derived names. No explanation given. And considering the way this particular alternate history went sideways, I think the last thing anyone would have had time for was trans-oceanic colonization.

The only way I can make sense of the writer's world-building is to suppose that the inborn magical protections some people developed against the paranormal intrusion were limited to (or at least concentrated in) the locations nearest that intrusion (which apparently happened in England). That would mean that people in, say, China and Mexico were just shit out of luck and died in droves. Instant genocide. Then a bunch of English people (plus some French people and some people of African descent) went off and settled the emptied continents in an effort to get away from the presumably ruined lands near the source of the paranormal catastrophe.

That is not a pretty explanation. It is also not given in the story. As I repeat, there is no explanation in the story. Just an Anglicized North America with a hint of French influence near New Orleans, presumably because that's the way North America is (or is perceived to be) in our world and the world of the canon source of which this story is an AU.

...

This issue is, unfortunately, not restricted to any one story, nor to fanfiction AUs. It shows up in lots of professional original fiction too. For example, why are the vampires in the Anita Blake series overwhelmingly of European descent? Where are the ancient American vampires, aside from the one we meet in Obsidian Butterfly? For that matter, why are the werewolves organized around European mythology? I can see why were-hyenas wouldn't use Native American terminology -- hyenas not being native to the Americas -- but wolves have been in North America for ever and ever, and I highly doubt that any European werewolves crossed the ocean until steamships were invented, since you can't exactly hide changing into a giant wolf on a small wooden ship on a months-long voyage. Even if European colonists were infected with lycanthropy, they should have been absorbed into Native American packs. So where are the American myths?

For another example, look at Nalini Singh's angel series. She postulates that there have always been immortal winged beings who A) create vampires and B) rule humanity. Fair enough. So again, given that there's an apparently Asian angel ruling China, and, IIRC, an African angel and an Indian angel in charge of sub-Saharan Africa and the Indian subcontinent, respectively, why is the angel in charge of North America shown as white? Why is the population of North America majority white as well?

Or even take JK Rowling -- why are her sketch descriptions of the Americas based on the muggle populations of those countries? Wouldn't wizards and witches have been less likely to emigrate from Europe? Therefore, wouldn't most ethnic-European witches and wizards have been Muggle-born, and trained (if at all) by Native American witches? (Presumably Native American wizards would be able to use their spells to survive where their Muggle brethren didn't -- even if the separation of the magical and the mundane is more a European Christian-influenced idea than an American one, and if Native American witches were part of the Muggle community, the entire history of North America ought to have gone noticeably differently from our world...) In any case, where are the Native American wizards? All we hear about are a few people of clearly European background who A) invent Quodpot, and B) run the Salem Institute.

Seriously, what is going on here?

It is not a given that Europeans will colonize the Americas -- that African slaves will be shipped over -- that the native population will die from disease and starvation and war, and the survivors be displaced and dispossessed and disempowered -- that European colonies will reach the Pacific -- etcetera ad infinitum. It is not a given that an alternate history will produce the same patterns of human migration and cultural erasure that our world has experienced.

To assume that every world will look like ours, especially when the world-building renders a strict parallel history track damned unlikely, is, bluntly, racist. Maybe not intentionally -- actually, almost certainly not intentionally; one must be thinking of an issue at all to have intent -- but intent doesn't change the outcome.

The outcome is an erasure of Native Americans.

I think it's pretty fucking ugly.

(Even when I otherwise like the stories in question.)

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*I am not naming the story, the writer, or the fandom because I don't want this post interpreted as a personal attack (especially since I don't know the writer from Eve). It's just random luck that her story was the straw that tipped me from saying, "You know, that's kind of skeevy," and then shunting the issue aside, to saying, "Okay, this is just not on," and getting genuinely angry.

Comments

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Rowling is a hack who took ideas from Jill Murphy and Terry Pratchett, simplified them for the lowest common denominator, and was lucky enough to strike a chord that caught the imaginations of people too dumb to appreciate the originals. It's blatantly obvious from her 'books' that she doesn't even understand the 20th-21st Century UK - how is she going to understand pre-Columbian America and the logical implications of how it would have developed in a world with magic?

Good world-building is hard. To understand another culture takes a lot of work. In order to create a well-developed Native American character for my Buffyverse story 'Came the Thunder', in which a Cheyenne Slayer who died in 1864 is resurrected into the modern day, I have had to do huge amounts of research and study. I've had to immerse myself in the complexities of Cheyenne culture and the Algonquin language family and, as a result, writing a single chapter takes months. Most people simply won't do that work and stick with what is familiar to them.

Also, during the research, I came to realise that an industrial civilisation could never have developed in North America if the European colonisation hadn't taken place. The vital ingredient was missing.

The domestic cat.

Without cats it is impossible to store grain for the winter and, unless you're far enough South to have an all-year growing season, the winter will always be a time of severe hardship for an agricultural society. Only hunter-gatherers can get by without cats - and the ancestors of the domestic cat never existed in North America.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

When I think about Rowling anymore, I have to suspend my disbelief. Over a cliff. It's the little things, like how for most of Hogwarts' history, England and Scotland were at war... so yes, let's put/keep a school for English wizards in Scotland, genius. Or how it's utterly ridiculous to build a full-isles school for wizards during the Heptarchy. The Heptarchy was less "states of America, our rivalries erupt in football~<3" and more "nations in Africa, our rivalries erupt in automatic weapons".

Then there's how the Founders can't even be contemporous from an etymological standpoint. Rowena Ravenclaw (Rowena Hrafenclauw, I'd have to check the spelling) is about right for "10th century south coast of the Firth of Forth (the bay into Edinburgh)". However, Godric Gryffindor is Welsh-French, which means at least 3rd-generation Norman. Helga Hufflepuff, Helga is clearly Norse, but the only form of "huff/puff" that existed before the 15th century meant "a scabrous growth" in 12th-century Cornwall! And Salazar Slytherin, gah. You have to make up some complicated backstory involving a Basque sailor in a Cornish port, and possibly a lot of travel in Moorish Spain.

Then there's how Slytherin apparently got kicked out for being anti-Muggle. Because of course wizard-Muggle relations were the driving force dividing the core of wizard society seven hundred years before the Statute of Secrecy. It certainly wasn't feudal class issues; or the 3-4 centuries of getting swapped between the Norse, the Danish, the Scots, and the Heptarchy; or those interloping Normans.


(Jared Diamond has a good book, "Guns, Germs, and Steel", in which he argues that the dominance of Europeans is more luck of geography than anything else. Not that he's necessarily right, but he makes the argument that progress comes from trade of innovations. Most of that's in crops and how to grow them, which changes with latitude, but it's also in germs which come with trade and the antibodies needed to survive them, and Eurasia has the only horizontal orientation in the world. He's not necessarily right, he says that several times, but it's still a good book to read, especially if you're going to be making major changes to see how they play out.)

[edenfalling]

Yeah, Rowling makes me put my hands to my face and sigh really heavily when I try to wrestle her world-building into anything resembling coherence. Still, while her failure at European history is more egregious and immediately noticeable because of its centrality to the plot, that doesn't make her failure at logical world history less annoying.

For example, the Statute of Secrecy itself infuriates me, because it is so obviously based on Euro-centric, Christian-influenced imperialistic assumptions that I cannot see A) how European wizards got anyone else to even attend their conference, and B) whether they did or didn't get the rest of the world to attend, why the rest of the world paid one damn bit of attention to the Statute. But clearly the rest of the world doesn't matter, since the fate of the world must be decided in Britain by the English. (I realize how that sounds coming from an American -- land of movies where the rest of the world doesn't matter since its fate must be decided in New York or LA by (white) Americans -- but still. Grrr.)

I keep meaning to read Guns, Germs, and Steel and then forgetting to get around to it. *makes note for the umpteenth time*

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

The Statute was signed in 1689. Much of the world wasn't even known to Europe, much less subject to any sort of diplomatic influence. (Which Britain sure as heck didn't have. The European superpowers of the time were Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal, if I remember correctly.)

Japan was a good 80 years deep into its Tokugawa isolation period, with laws mandating execution for any Japanese who left the islands and attempted to return. There had been only one European expedition (which was pretty much a complete failure) into the Great Plains at all -- the next one would be a century later, followed by Lewis and Clark in 1804, though the Spanish were making incursions into the Southwest and California. Qing China was at the height of its power. North Africa was under Islamic control, the Portugese were being slowly pushed off the Swahili coast, and pretty much the rest of Africa was under African control and had nothing to do with Europe. Australia was discovered, but being ignored (it didn't become the British penal colony until the late 1700's).

It's utter nonsense to think that the Statute was anything but local. And even then, why on earth would enemies of Britain agree to anything they proposed? "Oh, sure, we'll hide ourselves too, we certainly would never resort to underhanded tactics like getting rich noble Muggle patrons to pay for better schooling than your secret society can afford. Why ever would we want to get an edge over you and plot a war of conquest?"

[edenfalling]

Jill Murphy is unfamiliar to me, but I will keep her books in mind for future dry spells. Thanks for the rec!

As for cats, really? It's true that native American felines are all larger and wilder than domestic cats, but I seem to recall that terriers are bred to hunt rats and mice, among other vermin, and there were definitely dogs in the Americas. (I confess that I am ignorant of specific dog breeds, however.) Also, in an alternate history context, assuming the existence of magic, there is no reason we can't postulate magical constructs to hunt vermin or spells to otherwise keep them out of storage sheds. :-)

Furthermore, even if winter is a time of hardship for agricultural societies, there are places in the Americas that are warm year-round. (Many are even in North America -- it's a big continent, and it does include more than the northern US and Canada!) So it's possible that, if a few points in history had tipped slightly differently, some Central American societies could have developed more advanced technology and then spread those advances north and south, finding ways to combat winter storage losses as they went. Perhaps not likely, but possible.

(Also, I would not lump all North American peoples together as hunter-gatherers. There was a lot of hunting, sure, and sometimes seasonal shifts to secondary villages for fishing runs and so on, but many groups did a lot of farming too -- there is, after all, a reason American mythos emphasizes that the Pilgrims were starving until they learned how to deal with New England soils from the people they were dispossessing... the Wampanoag, I think? Anyway, people who have the patience to genetically engineer maize and then spread its cultivation over a continent are clearly not just "gathering" what happens to grow in the area.)

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall reading somewhere that ferrets were also kept to control vermin in medieval Europe, before the change to cats. Although ferrets are an Old World species, they're related to weasels, which are found on every continent except Antarctica.

As for the rest of the argument, about non-hunter-gatherer societies in North America being impossible: Cahokia Mounds, Illinois, across from St. Louis, was an agricultural city, with satellite maize-farming villages, and trade networks ranging from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast. In 1250, it was larger than London, England. Archeologists estimate it was the largest city in the USA region until Philadelphia in 1800. I don't think anyone can argue that St. Louis doesn't get winter.

[speakr2customrs.livejournal.com]

Ferrets work, although nothing like as efficiently as cats, and mongooses fill the role to some extent in India. The tayra can be a cat substitute in Central America. However the North American mustelidae species don't seem to be viable subjects for domestication and certainly the Native Americans didn't use them in that capacity.

I don't know much about the mound-builder civilisation but my impression is that it died out when the Lesser Climatic Optimum was replaced by the Little Ice Age. I would guess that it was viable when the growing season was longer but failed when the growing season shortened. Maybe if they'd had cats they might have managed to cope with the climate change - or maybe not.