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The Orenda Q8: Authenticity
If you google the author, you're bound to find comments on his authenticity. Boyden claims native descent, but has never been able to prove it - perhaps hasn't really tried. You can see much of this described on his wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Boyden
This kind of authenticity is really important to the native community, for reasons that I think will be obvious to any Canadian. My question here is not whether authenticity is important, empirically, but to what degree it matters to you. Think about your own unique cultural heritage. Who is qualified to tell the stories of your culture? Does that authenticity come from birth, upbringing, love, interest, or something else?
Comments
OK, so here are some thoughts.
First, on a personal level. I don't think I have any specific heritage to celebrate or be ashamed of - like most people here I am a right mixture of all kinds of different groups who have come into the UK over the millennia. A DNA test I took some years ago indicated that my remote ancestors came up after the last ice age from the Iberian Peninsula, so I guess back in the day they would be called Picts or Celts, but there has been a lot of genetic mixing since then. (I have a few % Neanderthal DNA from even longer ago). So I don't feel that others are precluded from telling stories about my heritage, as it has probably been contributed to by a great many people over the years. Basically, I don't think there's anything particularly unique about my culture and heritage that might make me think that other people should not be allowed to tell it. Neanderthals and Picts and Celts (and Romans and Angles and Saxons and Vikings and Franks and others) all experienced at different times to different degrees oppression, abuse and cruelty, as well as meting it out to others.
On a wider level, I have some discomfort at the idea that people ought not in principle be allowed to tell whatever story they want. Part of storytelling (IMHO) is bringing together different people's perspective on events and actions, and I'm not sure that it's right to insist on a kind of exclusivity. Should I (being a British male in his early 60s) only be allowed to write about people like me? No other nationalities or ethnicities, no women, no younger or older individuals, no aliens or fantasy creatures? To be sure, my perspective on any of those will almost certainly differ from people who have a different background or culture than me, but difference in and of itself is not, I think, a problem.
Now, in the wider author world this is certainly a big deal, and there have been some high-profile cases of groups organising sustained attacks on writers who they feel are misrepresenting the interests and pains of particular groups. A young woman who wrote a book including some issues of slavery was viciously (verbally) attacked by such an organised group who assumed (wrongly) that she was talking about American slavery, and felt that she had no right to tackle that subject, The idea that there might be other historical instances of slavery which might equally benefit from being discussed in literature did not, apparently, occur to them. Now, this kind of thing is, to be sure, easily facilitated by certain kinds of internet thinking, but not usually in the field of fiction.
Do I have any kind of conclusion? Not really, except for the personal first paragraph saying that I don't think anyone should be dis qualified from telling stories of my culture.
This is a good question, and I don't have good answers. I think @RichardAbbott has good things to say, and one strand of that is about "who has to right to speak for a community?" Richard says that many people have the right to speak for his community/hertiage (generic British mongrel), and I think that position is fairly soft because, recently, white British men have been in positions of power and authority which aren't much diminished by any contemporaneous narratives. For the record, I also fill all the "British, white, male, middle-class, middle-aged, cis-het" tickboxes. That means, it doesn't really matter who speaks for me or what they say; my privilege is secure.
I'm aware that's not the case for other groups. From what I understand, Native Americans have long had their voices stolen and "their stories" told by other people. I can well understand why Native Americans now object to anyone other than them telling their stories. That's all tied into power and privilege who's allowed to speak. But who can tell those stories? Who counts as "sufficiently Native American" to be allowed to speak, whether by Native Americans or others? Can a non-Wendat tell the story in this book? A non-Huron? A non-Native? I've no idea.
And, should I believe that this book has anything interesting to say about the Wendat? As a work of fiction, I think it's easier. I don't necessarily believe anything in this book. If I wanted to rely on some of the "facts" presented here, I know that I'd have to verify them from some other source.
I am a white Anglo-Saxon protestant with some Irish and Welsh tossed in, descended from very early settlers on the Mayflower, which means I have essentially no ethnicity.
...and fish don't believe in water. It's so pervasive, it's as if it doesn't exist.
I came across this Twitter thread (written by a Jew) about how much YA dystopian fiction has profound assumptions of white protestant society, even when it's trying to say something different. In particular, the Price in the thread points out that no-one in these books mentions the widespread and total genocide of people who don't conform.
Bringing it back to this book, I think that everyone in it, including Christophe, would find it a shock to be dumped into a modern Canadian or US city and would be amazed by many attitudes of the people around them.
I am amazed at the attitudes of people around me, and I've lived in a variety of Canadian cities my whole life LOL.
So my point is that my perspective MUST be that of the WASP by definition. Adopting any other viewpoint would be cultural appropriation. So there is no need to say anything to this question.
You would be more at home on the streets of Sumer...
That's why we get along so well. My brother is an ent!
When the great mass of stories published present a caricature of other cultures / peoples / whatever that lacks any meaningful insight into why and how we might have good reasons for not sharing a common, universal, stance to our present situation, perhaps something has gone wrong with our publishing of stories and storytelling. When all the stories published present violence and hatefulness as the human norm, perhaps something has gone wrong with who story-tellers tell stories about.
Seems to me that if fiction, whether literary or role-playing games, has a critical function, it surely has something to do with increasing human understanding of what is actually present as the frame of the fiction, in other words our present shared reality, whatever that, it, or they is / are. SF does the same, using the future to discuss the present.
Otherwise fiction is indistinguishable from bullshit, or flat out lying. I'd like to live in a dream too, but I think fiction should be intended to illuminate that, sadly, we do not, and that proves a challenge for all of us. We can interpret dreams, but I have a higher standard for authors than my unconscious.
I'd like to think that human imagination is universal, and while I don't know what should be the correct relations among fiction, fact, history, and identity, it seems to me that it is worthwhile to continue to try to be correct. It also seems to me that the mass of the stories being told also matters, perhaps matters more than individual stories and story-tellers. I don't see how this could be ever perceived,let alone understood, by looking at stories and story-tellers atomically. I don't think examining individual cells in a human body reveals much about the health of the person they belong to.
I don't see any good reason to think our public and common story-telling is in any way healthy, but I suspect discussions about authenticity and appropriation are more often ways of avoiding than approaching this tender point. I think the questions of authenticity might better be replaced with say, "Which parts of this are bullshit, which are lies, and which contribute to understanding?" "What did the author intend, and what did they actually accomplish?" etc.
Is that true of this book? I thought The Orenda was a sincere attempt to give an honest insight into the humanity and culture the people living at the time, all of whom are different from the mostly-WEIRD readers. It may or not be successful at that, but that's a different question. As for the violence, I think it would have been a mistake to whitewash it and pretend it didn't happen, but at least the story showed the violence in its context and showed there were clear alternatives to it.
That's not to disagree with your general point about many other contemporary stories.
Stories I might want to play in a game.
Are they different? Where is the grammar that organises the world differently? Where is the challenging motivation that the WEIRD reader cannot immediately identify? I agree with Kamal Al-Solaylee:
Which of the events in this story are we pretending happened, and which did happen?
Stories repeating cycles of violence are what I call structuring totalitarian ideologies - they obscure other aspects of human reality that are better for well-being. It makes sense to ask why the story-teller tells them instead of something else. And it makes sense to ask why violence is so necessary for RPGs.
I’m guessing both of this apply to a lot of fiction - at least fantasy novels and space operas and adventure fiction. That’s what most games emulate. Heroic fantasy, Space Opera, Westerns, and so on.
Then there’s investigative games, like the many Cthulhu games, in which the PCs are bot big heroes, but nevertheless are investigating the effects of violence. Sometimes investigators are heroes, like in noir (maybe anti-heroes is a better term for some - mavericks - who in the USA more than elsewhere are heroes). Then there are the Miss Marples and Cadfaels, who are protagonists but not heroes. There are lots of games like this, too, for example Brindlewood Bay.
There are very few games which deal with normal life. But there’s a lot of fiction that deals with ordinary life. The whole CanLit scene is this type of book. But you have to hunt for a game about this. I’m sure they exist, though.
So, if you want to read fiction that tells stories you might like to play in a game, what kind of stories are those? I get the idea you aren’t happy with heroic fiction, or the SF version. Nor muder mysteries.
What about something like Around the World in 80 days? Exploration and problem solving. What about PG Wodehouse stories, or Enid Blyton, or Anne of Green Gables?
I've written RPGs based on Baseball and on Rock music. There are a fair number of non violent RPGs out there if you look.
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Is the novel a bit dull in these places? Yes, I think so too, but I don't think that's the point you ( @BarnerCobblewood ) are trying to make.
Are you saying the Huron didn't have young men fixated on big tits, unplanned pregnancies, and casual sex? Are you saying those things only exist in WEIRD culture?
I think Boyden is pointing out the shared humanity between us (mainly modern Canadian) readers, and the First Nations people of the 17th century. They weren't Noble Savages, they were People.
I think there are two very different points here.
One is how we deal with our history or colonialism and the damage it caused. Should we ignore it and deal with the situation we have now, regardless of how it arose? Should we go back to the past and revisit, perhaps rekindle, old grievances? I don't know, but I'm fairly sure we shouldn't cherry-pick from history and keep only the bits where people were kind to each other.
I think at least part of the motivation for this book is to communicate, to a non-First-Nation-descended audience, something about an often-ignored aspect of the founding of Canada. In particular, how Europeans exploited existing conflicts to eliminate First Nations that were unfriendly to them. We can debate whether it's successful at that communication, but I really don't think this book is attempting to put forward a totalitarian ideology.
The other point is why violence is "necessary" in RPGs and, by extension, is so common in our media. I won't add to the mountains of literature on it, reiterating the points of escapism, death being a clear and immediate stake in a contest, etc, etc; but I will share your lament at the limited variety of stories in a hobby that is meant to be about anything we can imagine.
But it doesn't need to be that way! Recent games I've run have been Wodehouse-inspired farce, the trials of running a Formula 1 motor racing team, and a couple of action-adventure games where the PCs were emergency first responders. I'm looking forward to playing Fight With Spirit, a game about teenage sports teams.
Building on the fiction side in parallel with gaming, I think historical fiction in particular faces this problem. If you're writing contemporary fiction then your readership will judge you on how well you present contemporary life in whatever country/culture is your setting. If you're writing fantasy or science fiction then the test becomes how credible the world-building is, and (frequently) to what extent contemporary issues are being explored and exposed in a different context which (hopefully) allows readers to think about such things without having stereotypical responses.
But HF is a little bit different, as very neatly summarised by @BarnerCobblewood as "Which of the events in this story are we pretending happened, and which did happen?".
Let's take Forester's Hornblower series. The Napoleonic War certainly did happen, and the broad brush of the naval blockade of France, and certain other fleet actions and historical events likewise (the Peace of Amiens, Nelson's funeral, etc). We first meet Hornblower as a very junior officer, and although I don't know for sure, I strongly suspect that we don't have an exhaustive list of all such junior officers in the Royal Navy back then. So Hornblower himself as a midshipman or lieutenant, or even commander, cannot be proved not to exist, but we all assume that he did not in fact exist and is a fiction - hopefully typical enough of such individuals that the portrait is credible. It is widely held that Forester used actual diaries and similar sources to draw on.
But... Hornblower commanded ships (eg the sloop Hotspur features prominently in one of the early stories), and I'm pretty sure that we do have complete lists of all RN ships of the day, and that HMS Hotspur probably is not among them. So Hotspur is a thing which we are pretending happened, again hopefully with enough research to make the presentation credible.
Now, as Hornblower ascends in rank it becomes increasingly unlikely that we would not know of his existence, if he was real. So if you like he becomes increasingly an obviously pretend character, rather than a character who might be real but we can't be sure either way (and some folk reckon that the stories suffer to a degree because of this). But there are also clear inventions - he becomes involved with and later marries Barbara Wellesley, sister of the Duke of Wellington, who is pure invention and exists partly to give him some genuine relational happiness and partly as an introduction to high society (to which otherwise he had no means of access). Presumable Forester could have made up a upper class woman from a purely imagined family, but he made a different authorial choice. Does this matter?
Equally, his promotion to admiral is absurdly quick, and we do know of captains on the RN list who had become so before the fictional date of Hornblower's promotion to captain, but who were still captains long after Hornblower's promotion to admiral (the RN of the time promoted captains in strict seniority order, so this should not have happened). Again, does this matter?
Now, arguably these and other historical irregularities in Hornblower are less important than certain ones in The Orenda, because they do not concern the treatment of indigenous groups by colonial powers. But the principle is, I think, roughly parallel - certain historical events and individuals are woven into a fictional presentation alongside other individuals who are pure invention but (hopefully) sufficiently representative of their time and culture to stand in for the people who really were there, but whose names and lives we do not know in any detail.
I've been thinking a lot about @BarnerCobblewood 's points, and how they actually apply to contemporary fiction as much as historical (by means of incorrectly representing professional conduct, or whatever).
But rather than that, I wonder if I might enquire about the somewhat related matter of what GM's do if participants in a game act in a way which is out of line with the context of the setting - which I suspect happens all the time. I remember years ago casually saying to the GM in a game set approximately in an 18th century setting that I would do mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on a fellow player who needed help. Now, looking back I am totally convinced that my character (a smart individual of low social class) could not possibly have known of such a thing - I was retrojecting my own knowledge into the character.
So... as mature players do you avoid such heinous things or not? And as GMs do you frown on such things?
I think it most often comes up when playing in cultures with different standards of politeness. Modern euro-anglophone culture is much more casual about things like given names / family names than we were just a few decades ago, or (the classic) high samurai courts. If someone shows their character acting in a way that's acceptable now but wouldn't be there, you can ask what the player intends. Is this meant to be a normal interaction clumsily portrayed, or is it intended as a deliberate snub? In that case, asking the player for the intent if the action.
'No, your character doesn't take the teapot from the hostess and say, "Shall I be mother?" Instead, what they actually do is wait patiently to be served and complement the hostess on her exquisite taste in flower arranging.' (Or some other, genuine example of good manners.)
(As for mouth-to-mouth, yes, that was popularised in the 1950s. Definitely anachronistic.)