The Orenda Q5: Outcomes
Does the story have an inevitable outcome? Did the discovery of the The Americas by Europeans have an inevitable outcome?
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I kept wanting the several Indian tribes to sort themselves out and make peace with each other, but I guess that was never gong to happen.
In parallel I have been listening to Ursula LeGuin's The Word for World is Forest which in many ways tackles similar themes. I abandoned it for a long time as (unusually for my experience of UKlG) I found the first half to be really obvious and simplistic. When I finally returned to it I discovered that the last third is the best bit, but the film Avatar addressed the story much better (yes, I realise that Avatar came along much later and so had the opportunity to learn from the earlier work and its reception).
So the connection here is that in The Word for World is Forest there is a different outcome, principally because
a) the several tribes on that world did manage to unite against the oppressive invaders, and also
b) the thinking of the League of All Worlds about treatment of indigenous populations had changed, and could be communicated by ansible. That did not happen on nearly enough a timescale in the US to make any substantial difference - I don't know how the Canadian state has historically handled relationships with indigenous tribes, but the US does not seem to have done any better a job than the major European powers of the 16th and 17th centuries.
So UKlG wrote and presumably wanted a different outcome (ditto Cameron with Avatar) and so tweaked enough of the wider background factors to make it happen.
Not sure what you are asking here - a more recent past is always inevitable from an earlier past, because the past is certain. Seems like your question is about counterfactuals, whereas the idea of historical fiction is that the end is certain, because it is already known. Did the authour know the end of the story when they started writing? I don't know, but a lot folks say this story it is closely based on Jesuit records, and they have a pre-destined ending set up. I was disappointed with that.
I have a feeling that this goes back to how much the story interacts with known (ie recorded) events. For example, it may be (I don't know) that Christophe is a historically attested individual. But Bird and Snow Falls surely are not. So although the ultimate end of the Wendat nation may well be known, the specific ends of Bird and Snow Falls are not. One can easily imagine an alternate version of the story where Bird is killed in battle but Snow Falls survives. Or where both survive and go off to join other tribes. Or whatever.
Equally, let's suppose Christophe is a real person. Then it might well be that we don't actually know what happened to him in the end. Again, one can imagine an alternate version where he is not killed by torture, but escapes to die of exposure, or where his experiences turn him away from the Jesuits so that he joins an indigenous tribe and drops out of (European) circulation (and in the process probably has a happier life). If Christophe is not in fact historically attested but is a kind of representative surrogate for other actual Jesuits, then the author's freedom of action is even greater.
So in short, whilst the big picture may well be known from history (for example a version where the Wendat and other tribes join forces and drive the Europeans back into the sea might well be a great story, but is not historical fiction), the small-scale details probably aren't, and it's often these that as a reader one fastens onto.
I'm responding more to the second question. There is a question about whether history ever ends, which is tied up with question of the writing of history, but is this novel history, or story?
Keep in mind the question are there to spur on discussion, so there may be many good interpretations.
In the first part I was meaning to ask in it was inevitable that the Jesuit mission ended in flames, that the Jesuits would be brutally murdered by the Iroqouis. That the natives would be tempted by alcohol and firearms and trade goods to take the fight to one another?
In the second part, I'm wondering whether there might have been a different outcome from first contact. Or was it inevitable that disease and technological disadvantage were going to take their toll. As a reader and a gamer, I'd be very curious to hear about other possible outcomes - if there are any. I've never heard of a book or game that speculated something different, though.
> In the second part, I'm wondering whether there might have been a different outcome from first contact. Or was it inevitable that disease and technological disadvantage were going to take their toll. As a reader and a gamer, I'd be very curious to hear about other possible outcomes - if there are any. I've never heard of a book or game that speculated something different, though.
Nor me, in specific relationship to first contact in North America, but see my earlier comments about _The Word for World is Forest_ and _Avatar_ about approximately parallel fictional situations
It's true, I've also never heard about a book about the America or Australian colonial experience that posited another outcome, like say The Man in the High Castle does for WW2. Never say never though.
For me the European discovery of the Americas, and later the Pacific beyond the Old World, are tied up with Europe's relative poverty when compared to the rest of Asia. Alexander invaded India, not the British Isles. The Western Europeans lucked into gold and slaves which enabled them to compete on a world stage, especially with India and China. The wealth of Egypt and the Ottomans, Levant, Holy Land were also greater than Western Europe for the longest time I think. Not any kind of expert though.
I also think it was a terrible shock (reverberating to this day) to the Western Europeans that their previous cosmology was so utterly wrong, which untied them from their place in the world, which in turn enabled behaviours that would not have been possible before their World was undone. The Jesuit Order itself is an example of an effect that this loss of cosmological significance produced in the Church.
Of course these ideas are very crude, and don't explain much if anything at all. I don't see any awareness of these kinds of ideas in the novel though.
Another book you might think about as an alternate outcome is one we read together, Aztec Century, though of course that was dealing with Central America rather than North America. Lots of inversions in that, including Europe being swept by plagues to which they had no resistance rather than the Americas.
In the small scale, the story was far from inevitable, though it was inevitable given the characters we had. By that I mean it was a Tragedy in the dramatic sense: Bird's fixation on retribution for his wife directly led to the destruction of the Wendat. But if Bird had been different, the outcome would be very different. Bird could have grieved for his dead family without acting on it with murder and kidnapping. He could have been persuaded to return Snow Falls. He could have not sabotaged the peace negotiations. Any of those would have ended the feud, but Bird's character prevented those paths being followed. So: if Bird had been slightly different, the outcome for the Wendat would have been very different. But Bird had within him the features that made such destruction inevitable.
Other things could have been different. The Wendat could have received more than one musket. The various plagues may not have struck, or not struck so heavily, or struck a neighbour. Christophe's mission could have had more support, strengthening the Wendat. All of those would have led to different stories.
But I think those changes wouldn't have fit the narrative of the destruction of the Native Americans at the hands of the Europeans (whether intentional or not). The book, I think, is a response to that real-world fact; it's an attempt to humanise the Native Americans as something other than tragic victims.
We don't know for sure that the feud would have ended - it may well have continued even after Snow Falls was returned. If the English had not given the Iroquois guns, things might have ended differently, too. But it seems inevitable to me that the English were always going to trade useful things to the First Nations in exchange for furs, and so were the French. How else were they going to get all those furs? They needed a native trade network, and once the power of firearms was demonstrated, naturally the First Nations would want them. I feel that this is one inevitability in the story. And, if those First Nations had a culture of revenge, that could escalate quickly. The revenge culture (if it even existed) doesn't seem inevitable to me, thought.
I'm really not sure why endemic American diseases wouldn't have affected Europe, though (as they did in Aztec Century). A book I read last year (The Lost City of the Monkey God - about the discovery of ruins in Honduras) spends a lot of time on the subject of how diseases from the 'new world' could leap out of the jungle to infect the old.
I totally agree that the book is a response to real-world fact - exactly as @NeilNjae says, an attempt to humanize the Native Americans as something other than tragic victims.
That's true, as is the notion that the English and French would try to pit their allied First Nations against each other for the advantage of the European powers. As for the revenge culture and warfare, I was reminded of a post on the Dothraki by an historian, which mentions how Great Plains Native Americans changed their warfare patterns in response to the introduction of both horse and guns, with the point that they didn't reach a stable stage of using both before Europeans fully occupied their territory. The First Nations in this book are at that stage of initial responses to new, more lethal, technology of war.
That is an excellent article, with a lot of other points of some connection with other discussions we have been having around The Orenda (the article discusses Plains Indian groups rather than the Great Lakes area ones of our book, but nevertheless some connections can be made, I think). So thanks very much for linking it to our discussion. Here for example is a short section on raiding for wives and children...
PS he also covers as a tangential point another matter we have talked about, viz the need for popular and influential historical fantasy (and by extension historical fiction) to be accurate so as not to establish incorrect stereotypes in the minds of viewers/readers. Of course, he's talking as a historian so is hardly unbiased in the matter, but it's a persuasive point.
I should have said, the pertinent part about guns affecting warfare on the Great Plains starts with the paragraph containing "The popular image of the Great Plains Native America is unarmored": https://acoup.blog/2021/01/08/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-iv-screamers-and-howlers/
However, I think we should be careful about generalising from the Great Plains nomads to the Great Lakes farmers. The "large tribe is the safe tribe" comes partly from wanting large numbers of fighters for war and deterrence, but also from the different nature of food supply. Farmers have higher population densities than nomads, so it's easier to gather what fighters you have for defence (they get food from small fields rather than large grasslands). And luck plays a larger part of food security for nomads. A bad harvest still provides some food for the whole village, but a catastrophe can wipe out all of a family's herds meaning they have no food at all. There's a lot of "cattle" loans between groups to hedge against these catastrophes. At least, there is in Eurasian steppe nomads, I'm not sure how many cattle loans there were on the Great Plains.