quote:In 2009, The Thirteenth Child came out to mostly positive reviews...and a whole bunch of controversy. Wrede tried to avoid all the various bad options by removing Native Americans from the equation entirely, and writing about an American continent without them. Given the generations of effort white people put into removing Native Americans from the continent, this was seen by many people as a problematic solution, at best, to the question of how to write about the frontier.
This started me thinking, again, about all the wrong ways to do it. The problem is that the process of colonizing the Americas was ugly. Stunningly, shockingly ugly. Horrifying even by the standards of the day: "I fought through the War Between the States," wrote a Georgia soldier who participated in the Cherokee Trail of Tears, "and have seen many men shot, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew." Whitewashing this history is profoundly dishonest. Pretending that the Native Americans were the bad guys is profoundly dishonest. How do you write about the frontier from the white perspective while acknowledging the basic horror of what white people did?
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Sounds interesting, but I'm confused about one thing. I thought the Trail of Tears was in 1839, about 22 years BEFORE the War between the States. The Georgia soldier's quote seems to imply a different chronology.
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I don't see the Georgia soldier's quote implying anything about the relative chronology of the War Between the States and the Cherokee Removal. He uses his fighting in the war and having seen many men shot merely as points of comparison on a scale of awfulness.
Posts: 99 | Registered: Nov 2003
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A little more research shows he was a Confederate colonel. If he were eighteen in 1939, he would have been in his forties during the Civil War, which would not have been too unusual for an officer.
Posts: 99 | Registered: Nov 2003
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