Reading Wednesday

[sabotabby]

Just finished: Indigenous Ingenuity: A Celebration of Traditional North American Knowledge by Deidre Havrelock and Edward Kay. This is worth a read but also I wanted it to be better than it was. My main issue was the tone of condescension cloaked in breathless wonderment towards its young audience and precolonial Indigenous peoples, which I honestly do not think is intentional on the part of the writers and more a factor of how people think that children ought to be spoken to. My second issue had to do with the ending, which focused on ecological technologies and suddenly jumped forward to present day Indigenous Nations working with governments to create sustainable ecosystems. Very cool, but because of the book's structure and emphasis on precolonial technologies, it made it seem like Indigenous societies today are only working in that field. (This is not remotely true! If the section on communication technology had, for example, included a jump forward to discuss the Skobot, I'd have been fine with this aspect.) But also, it described things like carbon trading fairly uncritically, when in fact while carbon trading is better than carbonmaxxing like our current overlords are doing, it's a fairly useless system that greenwashes the omnicidal criminal corporations turning our world into a burning hellscape. So if the book is inaccurate about this, what else is it inaccurate about?

Beowulf translated by Francis B. Gummere. It's Beowulf. This is the less fun translation, albeit the one I'm more familiar with, because my hold on the Headley one didn't come in on time. We can discuss whether or not it's the most metal of all historical epics.

Currently reading: To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose. Speaking of Scandinavian-influenced epics. This is the sequel to To Shape a Dragon's Breath, which as you might recall broke all the way through my general dislike of YA to be one of my favourite books of the year. So far I am binging this and it's excellent. Our heroine, Anequs, wants nothing more than to get through her time at Kuiper's Academy, get licensed to ride her dragon, and return to her people on Masquapaug permanently, preferably with her two love interests, Theod and Liberty. But now the Anglish have set up a presence on the island and she's increasingly being drawn into shitty white-people politics that she wants nothing to do with.

This introduces a whack of new characters and factions. There's a Jewish character, Jadzia (Blackgoose, you fuckin' nerd lol), who I adore, and a secret society called the Disorder of the Grinning Teeth, which is the name of my new black metal band. There's also a new teacher whose name escapes me but who provides an interesting contrast in pedagogy from the first book. I should add that this is very much a magical boarding school story and not a residential school story, so it's very cool to see the idea of colonial educational institutions that could, theoretically, be reformed and democratized rather than needing to be closed and having the people who run them thrown in Forever Jail. 

Also the dragons are cool.

Comments

[asakiyume]

main issue was the tone of condescension cloaked in breathless wonderment --You were saying this in the context of strenuous and earnest communications with children, but I feel like it's true in general.

And a thousand yeses to the fact that indigenous people's wisdom isn't just limited to sustainable ecosystems. I remember a story on a low-tech flood warning system developed in Bangladesh (basically people just phoning to someone at a point further downstream from a river to say that the river was running higher). This saved lives and used tech that people had, didn't require a lot of infrastructure, and worked. Totally something that people ANYWHERE could benefit from. Not sure if all the people involved in that initiative count as indigenous, but it's definitely a case of Global South people solving a problem in a way that doesn't require participation in the international-aid-industrial-complex, using local experience and insight, and that's just a very smart system.

[sabotabby]

Many such cases.

There are Indigenous people amazing work in practically every STEM field. I know more about my own fields obviously, but like, the architecture section could have been expanded to include engineered timber, which is so cool and something that I would love to know more about. I guess that's material for a different book that's more focused on contemporary technologies, but I don't know that this book exists yet.

[asakiyume]

But maybe it will--and maybe even it will exist written by indigenous people for other indigenous people, and then the colonizer world gets to learn about it at some point later.

I have as this idea that I'd like to be reading more Global South newspapers** so that I can get a sense of these things, but I haven't really acted on it. Twitter used to be good for this because you could follow local journalists in other regions--but then Elon Musk happened.'

**And obviously there are plenty of indigenous people in the Global North, too--my focus just happens to be southward.

[troisoiseaux]

We can discuss whether or not it's the most metal of all historical epics.

Is it, in your opinion?

[sabotabby]

I haven't read enough to comment. It's pretty metal though.

[yarrowkat]

Beowulf is certainly very metal.

that "tone of condescension cloaked in breathless wonderment towards its young audience" - sometime after the success of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkein wrote in a letter to a friend that if he could go back and rewrite The Hobbit, he would, primarily to change the tone in which it is written - because it *sounds* like you're talking to children, and for the most part, children & everybody else hate that and it's not necessary. he said all that more eloquently of course, but i don't have the quote ready to hand.

[sabotabby]

The older I get, the more I appreciate Tolkien (though I would characterize the Hobbit as...not that, tonally. It's got a very particular narrative voice that feels more like hobbits talking to each other than an adult talking to children.).

I always wonder whether there are children who like this kind of voice, and what percentage of children they represent. Because I had trouble with a lot of children's media from a very early age—I didn't like children's music, cartoons, or anything like that. I was fine with older books, like Tolkien or Lewis or Dahl, but not modern stuff for the most part, and not cartoons or music at all. Presumably this media appeals to most kids, though, or they wouldn't make it.