Wiscon 35: Where Is the Indigenous American Fantasy?

[oyceter]

Why is American fantasy so Eurocentric? If you believe our fantasists, American cities are populated with imported Romanian vampires, Russian werewolves, Celtic faeries, Nordic gods, Germanic witches, and the (very) occasional African god or Arabic djinn, but scarcely a homegrown magical being to be found. In fact, indigenous magical beings abound in the Americas and their stories of magic, wonder and horror are widely told by spoken and written word. North American mythology is rich with magical beings. Do these stories get adequate air time? Is it easier to imagine an Old World teeming with supernatural beings than to visualize a North America enchanted with indigenous mythical beings? Is it difficullt to believe that we live in a naturally magical place? And if we did, what would it look like?
Theodora Goss (mod), Valerie Estelle Frankel, LJ Geoffrion, Andrea D. Hairston, Katherine Mankiller, Georgie L. Schnobrich

This is an assembled summary of what I remember from the panel sans notes; as such, attribution will be very hazy. Please let me know when I get something wrong! I am also inserting a lot of my own commentary in here.

This wasn't the best panel I went to this Wiscon, and it was very problematic at points, but it's also the panel that I've been turning over most in my head so far.

I wasn't even sure I wanted to attend this panel, given the description—I think American fantasy is so Eurocentric not because we (and who is this "we" anyway?) have a difficult time visualizing a magical North America, but because US history has so thoroughly tried to overwrite and destroy non-European peoples' histories and heritages. The question the panel poses makes it sound as though fantasy just happens to be that way, and while I read no malice into the act, I also think the causes are systemic and global and not some fascinating quirk of (white) US fantasy authors. I was pretty sure Andrea Hairston (ADH) would be interesting and non-faily, but didn't know much about the other panelists. I nearly left early on, except I saw Moondancer Drake and Diantha Day Sprouse in the audience and figured that at least if things started to go faily, several people would be trying to pull the panel back on course.

I was further dismayed with Theodora Goss (TG)'s introduction; she noted that she most definitely did not have the background to be on the panel, being someone who still remembered her first look at the US out of a plane window when she was a child and having written much fantasy influenced by her Hungarian heritage. (The dismay was preliminary, since I am very tired of conversations about European-descended people debating what constitutes "American." I think TG did a good job moderating in the end.) Valerie Frankel (VEF) had researched many mythologies to write her book on the hero's journey, including that of various indigenous peoples. LJ Geoffrion (LJG) has written works incorporating beliefs from around the North Midwest, and although her family tree very early on notes an ancestor married "an Indian named Jane," she said that her family history had been very insistent about the lack of Indian blood and the erasure of that history. ADH said that although her own family history spoke of Native ancestry, there was no documentation or way to be certain. Georgie L. Schnobrich (GLS) went back to the "My ancestors [from Europe] have been here for generations, but do we count as 'American'?" Katherine Mankiller (KM) also identified as Native.

I say I don't care about this question because I feel so much dialogue about USians centers around European-descended people feeling somehow inauthentic as USians and vaguely guilty about not being Native American, and quite honestly, I am sick of that as the focus on the "who is USian" debate. Because much as European-descended people angst about this issue, when most people (USian or not) say "American," they almost always think of a White American. Not only that, but it's much easier to assimilate when you look white. Obviously, this is complicated, and assimilation carries just as many negatives as it does privileges, but I feel being white and American leads to a very different set of "Who is USian" problems than people who are brown and read as perpetual foreigners.

ADH began by saying she thought the answer to the question of the panel title was easy: colonization! KM also agreed. ADH also mentioned that she wanted talk about the lines between "mythology" and "religion" and would instead rather say "stories about people's relationships to the cosmos," largely because "mythology" carries the implication that the belief system is no longer in practice and up for grabs for whoever wants to write about it. VEF said that the mythology vs. religion discussion could go on forever and belonged in a textbook. I rose my hand and commented that I was actually very happy that the panel was looking at the two terms, since I thought labeling things as "mythology" vs. "religion" was a tool that colonizers used to discredit and overwrite the colonizeds' belief systems.

I felt a lot of the panel consisted of ADH, MK, and LJG talking about various Native stories from different nations and regions and the potential for great fantasy stories there. GLS would occasionally interject by saying that [some] authors felt very nervous about using Native stories because they were afraid of getting it wrong. I think KM countered by saying that authors being afraid of getting it wrong doesn't mean they shouldn't try, and also that an awareness of the amount of harm perpetuated on oppressed peoples is much more important than being afraid of failing. Panelists also noted the stereotype of the stoic Indian looking over his (usually his! and not hers or hir) dying nation with a single noble tear on his face, or the magical Indian mentor passing on the old ways to white people to graciously accede to them.

I forgot what the panelists said, but something sparked enough so I asked about fantasy involving not only Native American peoples, but also American fantasy that includes all the people who are traditionally excised from narratives, such as black slaves and Asian laborers, and had a very general thought on how a lot of what we think of as "American" fantasy still doesn't have that much from those Americas. I think I also recced Jeremy Love's Bayou and critiqued Gaiman's American Gods for somehow assuming that the gods coming over with immigration somehow stopped after the 1800s or something. Sorry, this recollection is very me-centric because I took no notes. I think this is when someone mentioned that Grace Dillon was working on an anthology titled Indigenous Futures, which sounds awesome. ADH talked about how she hated the term "pre-Colombian" and the myth of America as an empty continent prior to the arrival of the Europeans, and the panelists and audience talked a bit about which nations had been decimated by disease when colonizers arrived and how that directly corresponded with whose stories got told and remembered and kept.

ADH, MK, Moondancer, Diantha, and LJG all mentioned that the scarcity mentioned in the panel description is not a scarcity of writers, but rather, partially due to the gatekeepers. ADH talked about how her Redwood and Wildfire, about a Seminole Irish man and a Black woman, was met with a lot of "We do not understand your characters. What is the audience for this?" when she was shopping it around. I think Moondancer also talked about the pushback she got about her own fiction. People also shared anectdotal evidence of other people trying to shop around books that have Native protagonists and the difficulty of doing so. ADH also talked about syncretism in many African-American religions.

And given what we see being published and what was being recced by VEF and GLS as "American fantasy," I wouldn't be surprised if the anecdotal evidence is just the tip of the iceberg of a general chilling effect on the industry regarding books starring characters who might fit into more than one "oppression box." VEF and GLS mentioned OSC's Alvin Maker series (white protag), Charles de Lint (Native protag?), Mercedes Lackey's Diana Tregarde books (Native protag?), and Emma Bull's Territory (white and Jewish protags). I'm a bit amazed and thankful that Mammothfail didn't get mentioned until the very end of the panel.

I can't remember who talked about it, but I remember people mentioning the ghost stories that might surround things like the Indian boarding schools or Black slave quarters or Chinese migrant workers on the railway. This is around when I started doodling around in my head; there are all these stories that are almost all untold because they star people who don't fit into the "who is USian" narrative, and here we are at a panel asking why these stories aren't there, as if that negative space were an accident. As if it were just chance that most of the "big name" (or at least bigGER name) books are by white people and were being recced by white people. ADH also mentioned Louise Erdrich and Tony Hillerman as people working outside the fantasy genre but with fantasy elements, and the panel briefly talked about magical realism vs. fantasy. Another audience member talked about Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer as well. (And I wish I talked about Drew Hayden Taylor, but I felt I was already talking way too much from the audience. And now I wish someone mentioned Colson Whitehead.)

Most of the discussion was focused on the US, although the panelists mentioned that "North America" alone is very broad.

I kept thinking about this as the discussion went on to "modern" "American" mythology. GLS talked about how many traditions have twin gods and how there could be a very interesting fantasy about the twin gods of the road and the automobile. The panelists also talked about urban myths as the new American mythology, from "the chicken at KFC isn't real chicken!" to alligators in the NY sewers and Mythbusters. An audience member brought up the myth of capitalism and the invisible hand, and how there could be some very interesting fantasy written around that.

I admit that I was getting very antsy by then, partially because I've heard discussions before on what constitutes "modern American mythology" and the "new American gods" and things like Gaiman's take. My general take on it is that it's a way for white American people to feel like they have a mythology and contributes to the fiction of white people having no culture and all the brown people having their strange, wonderful, magical traditions. There's this unspoken sense of generality in the attempt to find "modern American mythology" that bothers me, because it is an attempt to be inclusive without trying to acknowledge and right the way different peoples and cultures have been excluded from "American mythology."

I also felt like there was an elephant in the room, in which USian history is the modern American mythology. I think everyone was kind of skirting around that, but I really wanted someone to say it so people could talk about it, and this is where I came up with my weird idea that maybe we cannot have very "American" fantasy precisely because people still don't deconstruct the mythology of USian history as much as they could. I do think that there have been and still are deconstructions of the Wild West and the frontier and etc., but what I really want is something like Octavian Nothing and how it tears apart the mythology of the War of Independence and the Founding Fathers. I think these deconstructions are there, but I suspect they are not common precisely because they make a lot of people uncomfortable and lead to the "But if my ancestors came from Scotland generations ago, we really aren't very Scottish anymore! We are American too!" discussion. Because deconstructing the mythology of USian history includes deconstructing the mythology of immigration and Ellis Island and the US as a melting pot.

Like I said, I think this deconstruction exists, but it's frequently much less pointed than I want it to be, and it sometimes ends up sidelined in the fantasy plot. People have said that the power of Octavian Nothing is that it is history, not sf (which I totally agree with), though I think it reads like sf to me in parts because it's tearing down the worldbuilding in many people's heads. I think that was why I was so frustrated about attempts to pin down "modern American mythology," because those attempts don't acknowledge the massive myth so many people do believe, Democracy and Immigrant Nation and Our Country 'Tis of Thee and Rugged Individualism, where slavery and the Trail of Tears and Indian boarding schools and anti-Muslim sentiment and food deserts and AIM and Black Power and "illegals" and etc. have roles in the narrative, are given chapters in the history books and acknowledgement in alternate histories, but they are not THE narrative. Because colonization and genocide and enslavement are almost always shown as the "dark side" of history, but not as history itself.

Anyway, that is my massive OT side thought inspired by the panel, and now I want to know where that USian fantasy is. Rec me stuff! coffeeandink mentioned Karen Joy Fowler's Sarah Canary, Louise Erdrich, and Terry Bisson' Fire on the Mountain, as well as Laurie Marks' Elemental Logic series as not a direct take on US history, but as reflecting many themes about colonization. I feel Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots kind of does this, but not as cohesively as I would like. I am not specifically sure what I am looking for, but something about how the mythology of USian history directly results in all the "dark side" narratives, and not just that, but how they are tied together, like how the War of Independence went hand-in-hand with declaring people's (but only some people!) right to property as a freedom, how oppressions are often framed as "unfortunate side effects" when those very oppressions are built right into the US's history.

Comments

[coffeeandink]

Before I even read your notes! I don't think Evaristo is taking on US history, I think she's taking on UK history. So naturally it looks a little off-center from US perspective -- the center is elsewhere.

Also, duh, I can't believe I forgot this after writing up panel notes on it! Obviously magical realism is very much in response to this, from The Kingdom of This World onwards.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I included Evaristo because IIRC, there's a bit set in the Caribbean? I definitely agree that it is much more a look at the Atlantic triangle, which obviously impacts USian (and world of course) history but isn't really taking down specifically USian myths.

Ooooo talk more about magical realism as a response! I have read embarrassingly little of it.

I was also wondering if Butler's Kindred or even Wild Seed (the generational view of us history?) work?

[littlebutfierce]

This is a great writeup--thanks for this. And all your questions are spot-on, & yeah, I so agree w/you on what the push for "modern American mythology" is motivated by.

[oyceter]

Thanks for reading! And yeah, I get so annoyed with people being all "Let us find modern American mythology so we can stop feeling bad about appropriating Native American culture!"

[the_future_modernes]

Awesome write up and I like the questions you raise!

[oyceter]

Thanks for reading!

[tenured_fangirl]

It must have been a fascinating panel!

I'm going to take a chance that someone here might remember a fantasy trilogy I had once and now can't remember title or author. It was set in Georgia and focused on a high school boy who was a metalsmith and worked magic in/through these little metal figures he made. The only other specific detail I can remember is that while in prison his uncle had worked out a Tarot reading based on the first pop songs of the day he heard on the radio. Particular songs were particularly significant in the uncle's tarot system. The series was unusual as a form of contemporary American fantasy that was set in a rural area. Can anyone recognize which series I'm trying to remember?

Of course the only other contemporary North American fantasy I can think of comes from Charles de Lint's Canadian fantasy, which bridges Celtic and Native American and New Age fantasy.

[jinian]

I don't think this is it, but the setup reminds of Rebecca Ore's work, which often revolves around a place in rural Virginia where magic works. You might like Ore, though. Slow Funeral is very good, and there are other short stories relating to Bracken County.

[jiawen]

I'm not sure it fits, but Scout by Tim Truman might be worth checking out. The end of the series kind of devolves into gun nut fantasies, but I think the beginning (first ten issues or so) was pretty good.

[oyceter]

Oh huh, interesting! Do you know if Truman identifies as Native?

[wealhtheow]

Thank you for writing this up, and some of your own thoughts on it. I really like the way you talk about history, particularly, "how oppressions are often framed as "unfortunate side effects" when those very oppressions are built right into the US's history."

Anyway, book rec! I liked Felix Gilman's The Half-Made World, which is set in a sort of alternate US. There's the expected set-up as the east of the continent as an area of wealth, law, and learning (each problematic in ways I, as a US reader familiar with the way science, psychology, etc have developed in our own society, found very familiar) and the west as an area untamed and wild. A female psychologist sets out into the west, where she finds that it is being ruthlessly developed by the Line (basically an enclave of sentient trains who have created an entire industrialized society of serfs to spread rigid order) and opposed by the Agents of the Gun (a delightfully critical view of the Lone Wolf Anit-hero character so common in spaghetti Westerns). The natives of the west, the Hill Folk, have a great deal of power and strive to remain separate and not understood. The division between the encroaching settlers from the East and the natives in the West is further complicated by the presence of numerous characters of color among the settlers. It's the first part of a duology, and the second part isn't out yet, so I dunno how all these facets might continue to develop. But I will say, it's one of the more complicated, critical fantasy takes on the US's mythology of Western Expansion that I've seen yet.

[daedala]

There are mixed reviews of the Gilman.

[lenora_rose]

Of the books listed: I don't think Lackey's Diana Tregarde is a Native American (up here in Canada the most accepted term is usually First Nations, but that doesn't seem to have appeared in the US.) She wrote one book, sacred Ground, with a protagonist of Osage and Cherokee ancestry, but being Lackey, I'm skeptical as to how well she did or didn't do (Not to disparage Lackey as a person, but most of her attempts to depict minorities have been well-intentioned misses.)

De Lint does better, I think, though he has other weak spots.

NOBODY mentioned Thomas King? I thought Green Grass, Running Water was pretty much *the* book to point to. Maybe only this side of the border, though I thought he'd managed to make it in the US, too. I know that book sold both as literature and occasionally as fantasy and got commendations as both.

Tomson Highway is another Canadian (Cree) writer - most of his work has been in play form, AFAIK, but Kiss of the Fur Queen is a wonderful novel.

[oyceter]

Ooo, thanks for the note! I remember reading Sacred Ground in middle school and not being too impressed back then, though I don't remember enough to comment on the racial issues.

I also hate that a lot of the fantasy that does incorporate the "dark side" of USian history devolves into Revenge of the Colored People, where it's all about the guiltless white protagonists who feel such liberal guilt over the past, and they're being killed off by the ghosts of angry slaves/angry Indians/angry brown people! etc. Which I feel goes with the narrative that there is US history, then there are the unfortunate bad bits of US history (genocide! slave labor! etc!) that we will acknowledge to make ourselves feel better but never focus on because it makes white people feel baaaaaaad.

Um, sorry, totally random rant.

Totally looking up King and Highway, thanks for the recs!

[saraht]

Manly Wade Wellman wrote a kind of Appalachian-folklore fantasy-horror literature. Certainly about people on the margins of American society in terms of social class and education, though I don't believe the stories often address race directly.

[kate_nepveu]

It's been, eek, almost ten years since I read one of those ( http://www.steelypips.org/weblog/2002/04/wellman_manly_w.php ), and I found it very charming, but remember nothing about its treatment of race. I keep meaning to read more of those and really should.

Hmm. I don't even have that much USian fantasy, let alone stuff that fits the topic.

Sean Stewart's _Galveston_ is about Texas history and a magical Mardi Gras, but I have no idea if any of the characters aren't white. (I can't re-read it to see, at the time I thought it was a very good book that hit so many emotional sore spots that I didn't even write it up, and then I was writing up everything in a timely manner.)

Tim Powers' _Last Call_ is Las Vegas history & myth + Fisher King and is conspicuously free of anything about marginalized identities or Vegas history involving non-gangsters; I think the sequels have a Latina character, maybe? But I didn't like them as much so, again, don't remember them very well.

Emma Bull's _Territory_ is a secret history of the OK Corral and does feature Chinese characters, but not without problems in that depiction. Also it's only half a story.

Kage Baker's Company series *might* have a little bit of mention of structural oppressions in US history in the early books, but it's not the focus of the series by a long shot.

Yeah, I got a whole lot of nothing.

[dancesontrains]

Steven Barnes's 'Lion's Heart' and 'Zulu Blood' look at a world where North Africa colonised parts of North America, and they take white slaves as part of this.

[oyceter]

Oh interesting, thanks!

[kate_nepveu]

Also, I'm really late to this particular party, but I didn't see the author in your tags, so I'm reading _1491_ now and really enjoying it (nonfiction about the Americas pre-Columbus, the creation of the myths about the state of things, and how those myths are holding on).

[starlady]

That's a really good book! It totally shattered a lot of my received notions, and it's definitely stayed with me since I"ve read it.

[starlady]

I mentioned Michael Chabon's Summerland at dinner, and I'll mention it again here, with the massive disclaimer that it's much more the sort of thing the panel was looking for, iirc. And also it's Chabon and I read it about 14 years ago, so there's probably things in it that I would look askance at now. I really should reread it.

colonization and genocide and enslavement are almost always shown as the "dark side" of history, but not as history itself.

I'm going to quote you on that.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I think I got very frustrated because a lot of what was suggested by people on the panel as "American fantasy" I read more as "white US fantasy."

Quote away! ^_^

[rosefox]

Thank you for this writeup; I'm emailing it to myself with a note to ask you about possibly spinning off a Readercon panel from it next year.

[oyceter]

Oooo that would be really interesting!

[sqbr]

This was really interesting. Australian fantasy has a lot of the same issues, and there's the added layer of much of the media we consume (including fantasy) being from the US. Not that our local myths of Democracy and Immigrant Nation and Our Country 'Tis of Thee and Rugged Individualism are all that different a lot of the time.

I was thinking it might be interesting to have something like Buffy or Supernatural where the default "good" magic wasn't Western/Christian stuff like crosses or salt but magic from some other system, but that could end up a bit appropriative in the hands of white characters. Of course you could have a story about the approriation of magic by white people, hmm.

But alas I can offer no recs.

[oyceter]

Yeah, I feel you could actually have a story about the appropriation of magic by white people that would be very interesting, provided that it weren't still All About the White People. Honestly, I feel a lot of the problem with the question is that it's the wrong question; it's not why is there so little, but who's getting published and what kind of stories get published and how hard is it to sell something with a Native protagonist and the way "American" identity is policed through these methods. Or.... something like that?

[kjn]

Found this via Kate Nepveu.

Eric Flint has written the two AH books 1812: The Rivers of War and 1824: The Arkansas War. The primary focus is on the role of slavery in shaping the early US republic, but there is also a strong examination of relations between natives and European settlers on the frontier between the two. Of interest is that a proposed in-between book, The Trail of Glory that would center on an alternative Cherokee migration, was nixed by the publisher.

Lois Bujold's Sharing Knife books might also be of interest. It does fall partly into the "magical natives" trap, but at least it focuses on building sound relations between the various groups.

[oyceter]

Oh interesting! Does the Flint have Native protagonists? Will probably skip out on the Bujold partially due to Mammothfail and partially because I've bounced off her a lot in the past.

[estara]

I'm not sure about Diana Tregarde, but Mercedes Lackey does have one urban fantasy firmly using only Indian protagonists and side characters as the focus - Sacred Ground.

What I have no idea of is whether the use of Indian beliefs and rites is authentic and accepted by real Indians. It read positive and interesting to me.

[princessofgeeks]

thank you for the post. am linking and looking forward to recs.

[sheafrotherdon]

Linda Hogan's People of the Whale fits the bill, I think. Hogan is Chickasaw; the book is centered on a Native NW coast community, post WWII to the present. There are "fantasy" elements (in some sense of the word) in that there are characters who move back and forth through time, and who appear as both sea creatures and humans - but I'm not sure I think that's fantasy so much as a representation of a different sense of time and being, indigenous to the community. Maybe it's both? The book tackles the war in Vietnam (one of the protagonists volunteers to fight there, is MIA for a while (from the American perspective - from his own perspective he's found a new community, living and starting a family in a Hmong village) and then returns home (against his will) to try and sort out what the war meant, what it means to fight for the US when he's American Indian, what the parallels are between the war in Vietnam and the incursions his own community has survived. We also get the story of his daughter, back in Vietnam, who tracks him down in the US, and we have all the stories of the women back home on the NW coast who are fighting against the tribal council's attempts to begin whale hunting again.

I realize as I type this that I have no idea how to sum this book up - there's so much in it, and it's so beautifully written. I'm not doing it justice, but I think it does a lot of what you're looking for.

[cofax7]

Ah. You have reminded me of a novel I read some years ago. The Grass Dancer, by Susan Power, which is very much embedded in Dakota history and beliefs. I wouldn't call it traditional fantasy, though: it's closer to Marquez or Allende than to de Lint or McKillip. Magical realism, I guess. It's very very good, and I've always wondered why it didn't get more attention.

That said, I'm happy to see it's still in print.

[moondancerdrake]

Thank you for this write up. You pointed out several of the directions this panel could have gone and inplored that I wish it had dared to. Oh well. Maybe next year. :)

[oyceter]

Thanks for reading! And for helping drag the panel back on multiple occasions!

[sara]

I'm interested to see they had a panel on this.

Did nobody bring up that there are a lot of times and places where it's just not appropriate to even begin to get into traditional stories? Which makes a lot of them non-suitable for incorporation into modern novels and stories. I'm...augh, I think of that as such a basic principle when one is talking about traditional stories, but it looks like, reading over your description, issues like that didn't even begin to come up.

And where did these non-Native women get the traditional stories they want to use in their narratives from? Books, or the oral tradition, or tribal education programs, or what?

I dunno, I very very badly want an American (and I use American in the broad pan-continental sense in this context) fantasy that respects and is grounded in the living traditions of these places. Boy howdy do I want that! This business where we take a bunch of European or sometimes East Asian traditions and tack them onto a continent that's already got plenty of perfectly good traditions of its own drives me up the wall. But this doesn't look much like steps in the right direction.

[staranise]

I keep thinking this when I read descriptions of this panel. My country's literary tradition has so many cringeworthy attempts by white people to write Aboriginal culture and traditions that the only person of wholly European descent I've seen attempt it lately is Charles de Lint, who does all right; otherwise, like lenora_rose suggested, the real focus here is thought to appropriately be on Aboriginal-identified authors writing about their own communities and traditions--Sherman Alexie, Thomas King, Tomson Highway, and others. Their ideas of how the natural and supernatural worlds might blend seem different than the fantasy field's.

linked here from Circle

[longmagpieroads]

I think you are very definitely onto something with the idea that "we cannot have very "American" fantasy precisely because people still don't deconstruct the mythology of USian history as much as they could."

Having just finished a college class which essentially did just this (deconstructing the American Revolution and the American mythology that has grown up around it) for one of the last electives I needed in order to graduate...it's a very compelling idea you've raised.

One of the things that was pointed out by my professor is that a lot of what US kids in elementary, middle, and high schools learn in school about the Revolution and the Founding Fathers and How The American Nation Came Into Being is made up. It is essentially constructed myth and very deliberately constructed myth if you look at the work of Parson Mason Weems, and the work of Ben Franklin and others, to deliberately set themselves apart from Britain. The documentation from the timeperiod supports this, and yet...it's not taught in schools. It's not often taught in colleges either.

So I think you're right, that the USian history is the modern American mythology and that "American" fantasy is hard to write/come by without the deconstruction of the myths surrounding the USian history.

Re: linked here from Circle

[cofax7]

ICON LOVE.

[sophygurl]

Woo, thank you for this interesting writeup and hosting such an interesting comment discussion!

[oyceter]

Thanks for reading!

[dariaw]

Thanks for the discussion! I love the idea of fantasy based on US myths that are made to not appear as myths.

Did the discussion talk about genre much? I think part of the issue of indigenous belief systems as a basis for fantasy (PARTICULARLY for non-indegenous writers?) may be that the term "fantasy" itself implies a kind of Western-"secular"-Enlightenment assumption about what is "real" or not? I don't mean everyone who uses the word "fantasy" thinks that, of course, just that the name of the genre could be part of the difficulty in determining what counts as fantasy?

For example, I think Gordon Henry's Light People, is a great work of literature, whatever genre you want to put it in. But I'm not sure it should be called "fantasy," even though if it did similar things with European spiritual traditions,it might be. Is this a case where we should try for consistency among groups of different heritages (everyone treated the same) -- because we all know that might tend to erase the less dominant group as easily as it can diversify, and use the same definition of "fantasy" for all groups? Or do we consider the question of what constitutes "fantasy" to be determined by how the book relates to the various narrative traditions it draws on, which would mean that what makes a book "fantasy" might actually be considered different for a book that re-articulates a Celtic story rather than a Cree story, to use one example.

Also, in some circles interested in Latin American literature, what these panelists call "Indigenous American fantasy" might be called "magic realism." But that term has plenty of baggage too. So I guess I am curious to know if anyone has any thoughts on how genre definitions are part of this issue. I admit that I am more on the sci-fi side of genre fic so I am sure there is plenty of stuff about fantasy that I don't know and would be happy to know more about (hope I'm not stepping on any toes by asking).

[firecat]

Thanks for hosting this discussion - many new books in my "to check out" list.

[brigid]

Thank you very much for writing this. It's extremely thought provoking.

You might enjoy Cherie Priest's Eden Moore books (Eden is the character's name). Eden is African-American, lives in Tennessee, and deals with very specific places, people, and history. Also: ghosts.

[trinker]

Interesting. Most of my modern NDN reading has been via mystery novels.

And I'm wondering about Aliette de Bodard's recent Aztec-influenced story (which I have not read), and also I've heard of some attempt at PoC inclusion in the new Bordertown collection which was failly...