My heart bleeded, girl

Okay, a couple of observations on DWtS before I get to the serous stuff. One, I am really impressed with the feats of engineering involved in keeping the women's costumes in place. Also, those pictures of Ty Murray when he was a little boy are one of the cutest things I've ever seen.

All right, on to the point of this post.

For someone who doesn't read SF/F or YA novels, I sure do know a lot about them. There is a recently published book by Patricia Wrede, The Thirteenth Child which seems to be an AU in which America Columbia is discovered by some magical Europeans, and they find the land full of megafauna (wait, maybe the megafauna are magical? I'm not sure) and empty of people. People, you know, as in Native Americans/First Nations.

As you might expect, there is an ongoing discussion about the author's decision to eliminate an entire race of people from her book in order to, I guess, make the story less problematic, or less complicated to write?

There are a lot of links at naraht's Lj here, and the initial book review and discussion at Tor ishere, which explain it all better than I can.

Some people are having trouble understanding what the big deal is about erasing an entire population of people who were already almost erased in reality. Coincidentally, today Ashley sent me this email. She works in the Special Collections Library at Miami University and right now she's working on old children's periodicals. I'm putting this behind a cut, because it's just that offensive and appalling and I don't want anyone to feel ambushed by it. But it certainly goes a long way toward illustrating some of the historical reasons why something like The Thirteenth Child could be hurtful. (Yes, I am a master of understatement.)

( Ashley writes: )