NOT using the
panel discussions of the most recent World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose,
CA in August 2018 (to which I be unable to go (until I retire from education)),
I would jump off, jump on, rail against, and shamelessly agree with the BRIEF
DESCRIPTION given in the pdf copy of the Program Guide. But not today. This
explanation is reserved for when I dash “off topic”, sometimes reviewing
movies, sometimes reviewing books, and other times taking up the spirit of a
blog an old friend of mine used to keep called THE RANTING ROOM…
Part 1 is here:
https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2018/12/slice-of-pie-sioux-spaceman-beware.html
Andre
(Alice Mary) Norton’s THE SIOUX SPACEMAN is an adolescent space adventure story
– duh. It’s what she wrote, from her first novel, THE PRINCE COMMANDS (“a
straight-up adventure novel” – Lin Carter [an American author of science
fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor, poet and critic…influential as a
critic of contemporary fantasy and a pioneering historian of the genre…an
editor for Ballantine Books…he sponsored the Gandalf Award…” Wikipedia], from
the profile of Norton in the first edition of THE SIOUX SPACEMAN.
She
did have some Native American heritage: “A common theme in the books is the
presence of sympathetically presented feudal and tribal cultures. In several
books Native American tribes and their various analogues are given a chance to
be more successful than they were in actual American history. (Norton often told friends that she was proud
of her little bit of Native American ancestry.) Nonhuman creatures and
cultures are usually presented sympathetically, with human protagonists
sometimes supporting them against oppressive human authorities. In contrast,
several books present technological and mechanized cultures as negative or even
positively evil.”
So
– what do I think? I think she was daring. In an era when “America” was
everything – it was the BEGINNING of the civil rights movement – she dared to posit
a world where white Americans had killed each other off: “Norton doesn't give
many specifics, but we learn that on Earth, the white Western civilization
bombed itself into extinction. When civilization rebuilt itself, the Federation
of Tribes emerged as a leader in a world dominated by Native Americans,
Africans, Latinos, and the Chinese.”
As a former
teacher and now a counselor in a diverse near-urban high school, these are the
kids I see most often (though, instead of Chinese, we have a large population
of Hmong – again, people driven from their original lands by the Han migration of
Chinese settlers during the Qing Dynasty in the late 19th Century).
We also have a large number of Liberian, Somalian, and Ethiopian students as
well as students from Mexico, Ecuador, and Guatemala. This future isn’t very
hard for me to imagine. Also, though we don’t have many students from South
Korea, I was there for three weeks this summer and I can see a future where
South Korea is a far larger player than most people would think (how about
this: Kia, Hyundai, Samsung, and SK Electronics…as a point of reference, my
spell checker didn’t indicate that any of those are misspelled).
Kade
Whitehawk is far out of the stereotype (though the cover of the books – except for
the German edition I have above – do absolutely nothing to break the “injun”
bias of the time, go so far as giving Kade the winged-hawk-beaked-jingle-bell-helmet/thingy
on the cover of the first edition) that prevails in the US today. Politicians who claim to have Native American heritage -- unless they have clear and unequivocal proof of that ancestry -- will not impress ANYONE, where men and women who actually grew up in the culture and with the languages of indigenous peoples can perhaps move all of us toward kinder, gentler world.
At
the time the SPACEMAN was written, it was far, far out of the expectations and
images of Native Americans – even today in the second decade of the 21st
Century. (http://time.com/3916680/native-american-hollywood-film/)
Native Americans STILL have to stand in the shadows as white Americans play the
parts of THEM – “…Hollywood mainstream has cranked out a fledgling resurgence of
Westerns with (mostly panned) movies such as Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and
The Lone Ranger (2013). In these projects, Native American actors have been
restricted to background roles…”
As
I said before, I think some company – preferably a publishing company owned by Native
Americans – buy the rights to SPACEMAN and then continue the series, developing
both Kade and the Confederation on Earth. I think it would be fascinating…
But
given the current political climate, Native Americans have virtually no
visibility in politics – starting with the 2019 Congress, there will be “…four
Native Americans. When their terms begin, Davids and Haaland will become the
first two Native American women with documented tribal ancestry to serve in
Congress.”
From
the first in 1817, to the present, twenty-two Native Americans have served as
senators or representatives. [For those interested in such things: R=8; D=12;
R/D = 2] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States_Congress)
We
have a long, long way to go before we reach a place where Native Americans (in
particular) play a natural role in fiction, but I believe Andre (Alice) Norton
made a solid start.
For
another interesting discussion of indigenous science fiction, read this: http://aidanmoher.com/blog/featured-article/2014/04/ghosts-representation-indigenous-peoples-north-america-science-fiction-fantasy-maureen-kincaid-speller/
Sources: http://andre-norton-books.com/index.php/worlds-of-andre/individual-novels-by-andre/243-sioux-spaceman-the,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andre_Norton,
https://strangerthansf.com/reviews/norton-siouxspaceman.html
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