America was built on blood and bones.

[glass_icarus]

So this was originally going to be a rather pointless "happy Cinco de Mayo!" post, but... no. Can't do that anymore, sorry.

elsane has a post here that discusses Patricia C. Wrede's new book, Thirteenth Child [reviewed by Jo Walton here]. The premise of the book?

This is an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

This? This makes me shake with fury. America is not a nation that came into being solely out of the shining ideals of democracy and social justice. America was born through genocide and slavery and a set of very skeevy racial/social issues, and it is only because we have been and are still being forged through this darkness that we are where we are today.

An American alt!history without the genocide and slavery is a fascinating premise. An "American" alt!history that is written without the cultural clashes, the appropriation issues, the uneasy racial tensions, is one-dimensional and false. To cut the Africans and the Native Americans- and heck, even the Chinese railroad construction workers; how do you get railroads "creeping across the continent" without them, huh?- out of the picture is to erase the victims of social injustice in a story being sold to a society in which their faces already do not appear, and that? That is never okay.

Comments

[From: yasaman]

Oh God, I thought the exact same thing when I saw the post about that book in my Tor feed on Google Reader. I didn't check the comments for fear of having a rage blackout. I still had a "does not compute, cucumber error" in my brain at the notion of alt-history America without Native Americans. How anyone can think fictionally wiping out an entire people, an entire continent's native population, as if it had never existed is just a charming and interesting alt-history premise...AUGH. It is not a narrative of America without the native people of America. There is so much that would be different, just on the logic side of things. To have a fantasy American without them is just...stunningly offensive.

[From: glass_icarus]

Actually, people haven't been incredibly offensive (yet) in the comments; I've been talking a bit over there myself. My latest contribution: how the do you think the settlers managed to survive in the first place? Without the Native Americans to teach them what plants to eat, how to hunt, how to build shelter and how to cure hides, they would have died of starvation! (Well, presumably starvation would be the fastest cause of death. Exposure and disease would take a bit longer, I think.)

[From: michiko]

Ugh, a huge skanky race issue is the implicit conflation of First Nations/Native Americans and animals - the work of dehumanization so key and central to racism. Man, and I like some of Wrede's stuff, too. This is so disheartening.

[From: glass_icarus]

As far as I can tell, it's not that they're being conflated; it's that they aren't there. Someone mentioned in the comments that Wrede's idea was that the Native Americans had stayed in Asia, which is basically a too-convenient sidestep to me. I mean, you're writing an American fantasy and they aren't there, and yet despite the different climates/flora/fauna you magically manage to not die of ignorance while settling? Hmm, let's think about this.

And yeah, some of Wrede's stuff was my favorite childhood reading, and now- I don't think I'll be able to reread it without the bad-taste in my mouth.