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

[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.

[sara]

I...wouldn't agree on de Lint. Like, at all. I remain flabbergasted that he wrote a book in which Salmon was the villain. That's pretty much laugh-out-loud funny (the closest equivalent I can think of in the European tradition would be something like having your characters menaced for hundreds of pages by a very devious cow. The symbolic weighting is just so wrong that it's ludicrous.)

And I'm not sure that the distinction between natural and supernatural is all that bright-line, either. Or should be.

[staranise]

Ah. Yeah, my opinion on de Lint is a sign of my lowered expectations--he references actual living Indians on actual reserves! Better than everything else I've seen.

The distinction isn't bright-line at all, especially not in FN mythology, but it's not the same as the Western one; you can't just take a modern urban fantasy, shuffle out the Celtic or Abrahamic spirits, and shuffle in Indigenous ones. The types of stories and the types of worldviews they indicate are not the same.

[oyceter]

I completely agree with you re: finding Aboriginal-identified authors writing about their own communities and traditions. I was really frustrated with a lot of the recs from the panel, and Andrea Hairston rolled her eyes at the OSC rec but didn't want to get into that rant. But yeah, one of the issues I had with the question of the panel title was the focus on the stories themselves instead of looking for the peoples and communities who are already telling their own stories. Well, that and the assumption that just because broader SF/F aren't reading those stories, that they (and their creators) somehow don't exist.

[oyceter]

I don't actually remember if anyone brought up the appropriateness of getting into traditional stories, but I think when some of the panelists (Andrea Hairston and Katherine Mankiller esp.) were pushing back against the "OMG audiences are so sensitive what if we get it wrong?!" they were talking about the way a lot of Native stories and beliefs and... basically everything... have been appropriated and marketed to a non-Native audience and how harmful that is.

My reading on the panelists were that LJG did not identify as Native, that Andrea Hairston identifies a bit as Black Indian, and that Katherine Mankiller identified as Native, but I could be completely mistaken. I think Andrea, Diantha, and Moondancer (Diantha and Moondancer are also Native) did talk about where they were getting stories from, and my impression was that a lot of it was via community connections and not just through books and "studies" and whatnot. I also felt there was a very big divide among the panelists, where Katherine, Andrea, and LJG were primarily trying to highlight Native authors, whereas the Lackey and De Lint and Bull recs were coming from the white-identified panelists. I don't think I am reporting well on the discussion they had on gatekeepers and the way Native authors get shut out and don't get press whereas white authors get props! and accolades! and cookies! for writing "such daring/innovative/blah" topics. My general impression was that three of the panelists (Andrea, LJG, and Katherine) were trying to turn the conversation to discuss the lack of Native authors (which is why I am super sad no one mentioned Drew Hayden Taylor) instead of just being "Oh, how come there are no Native characters in fantasy?"

But yes, I completely agree that just slapping on some traditions and being all "Yay American fantasy!" is wrong. What I'd actually like to see is much more from authors who do know the traditions of this continent, but I think that has to come from people who have grown up with those traditions and are grounded in them, not people who kind of go in and think it would just be fun or cool or mystical or something. I am actually hoping there will be more authors of color in the recs, because I kind of side-eye the books by white authors with mainly white protags and the occasional character of color. I'm going more with authors of color not because I think they should all write Native American traditions, but because I think there could be some interesting stories in those communities (ex. Jeremy Love's Bayou, which is very grounded in the black experience in the American South), but I could also just be sticking my foot down my mouth in this aspect (and all others!).

[sara]

Hmm. Very casually and off-the-cuff, I'm just glancing around the room at what I've been reading over the last couple of years for worthwhile place-based US fantasy: some of Carl Sandburg, some of Roger Zelazny (though that's hardly diverse), some of Patricia McKillip's stuff lately has been actually-PNW-based in a PNW that I recognize, Michael Chabon, some of Tim Powers, some of Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Madeleine L'Engle, some of Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Willa Cather, H.P. Lovecraft, Kurt Vonnegut. I think Samuel R. Delany's Dahlgren is a very time-and-place-grounded American fantasy. Oh, and Louise Erdrich. Maybe Barry Lopez, he did a book of adaptations of Coyote stories (but that was kind of problematic in other directions, he wasn't too good about crediting the originators of those stories). Los Bros Hernandez, in comics. Some of Kage Baker, though again that bugs me in various ways.

I dunno. I'm not getting very many of the kinds of stories I really want to read, and it frustrates me because I kind of need new things to read every day. I want stories that happen in places that are recognizable and here, and my recognizable-and-here is...broad. Fantasyland often seems very narrow, for a place which is supposed to be about imagination.

I am...well, I am not surprised to hear who was reccing what, let's just put it that way. Permit me to break out my very special no-cookies icon. *sigh*

And I think there must be some ways to not treat the American continent as a blank slate, without devolving into skeevy appropriativeness. And ideally those stories would be told by people who have the rights to them and want to share them.

[oyceter]

I.... was not very surprised to hear who was reccing what either.

I'm not getting very many of the kinds of stories I really want to read, and it frustrates me because I kind of need new things to read every day. I want stories that happen in places that are recognizable and here, and my recognizable-and-here is...broad.

YES THIS. It is especially frustrating because I am all dude! Stories set in the Chinese immigrant communities in the 1800s or at Indian boarding schools and etc. about those experiences (i.e. not side Chinese character who teaches the white protag that Chinese Immigrants Are Not That Bad)... there could be SO MUCH, and the people who can tell those stories are ignored and the stories keep getting rewritten so they more closely resemble current US views on history and ARGH. But yeah, that is why I feel like you can't really have USian fantasy by the people who don't know the actual history, because all they do is replicate the current mythology of US history.

[sara]

I took the family out just now to the local Mongolian BBQ place for dinner and I was sitting there eating fried noodles when this came in on my phone and I read it and looked around the room and thought, when your genre is whiter than Saturday night at the noodle house in my very white town, you got problems.

Well, you're preaching to the choir, with me, about US history; I am too busy suborning that to go write the sorts of things I want to read. *GRIN* US history is so much bigger and weirder and filthier and more beautiful than most of the stories we tell about it.

Oh, that's another good one for my list of here-based fantasy: Gene Yang's American-Born Chinese, which is not in my room right now because the kid keeps making off with it. And, see, in that it really doesn't bother me to have Monkey as the mythological thingummy even though he's hardly an indigenous American figure -- because that's a story about a person trying to sort out how he fits into his individual cultural context, which is a really, really different thing from the usual urban fantasy elves are physically living among us bullshit.

[kore]

Oh, Erdrich, yeah, altho, like Isabel Allende, she seems to be....mainstreamed? more as "magical realism" than "fantasy," I don't know.

Also, GREAT icon.

[sqbr]

Thankyou for this comment, it (and the resulting thread) helped things click into place in my head. Oyceter's right, "Why is there not more fantasy (with the same narratives we're used to, by the same white authors) with Indigenous elements?" really is the wrong question.