As those of you who have been following my LiveJournal for a while already know, back in April 2007 I participated in the Game Chef event — an annual challenge to design a “complete” roleplaying game in a week or two, based on “ingredients” which weren’t revealed until the event started.

The game I designed was called “Bone White, Blood Red” and it was a story game based on the events of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. BWBR used some pretty clever innovations that haven’t been employed extensively in game design circles, most notably the use of beads on leather cords to represent “character sheets” — and I was always rather pleased with how the “Game Master” (GM), a male-tinged title of authority found in many RPGs, became Spider Grand-Mother (SGM), a playful, wise, and teasing elder who reminded me of my own grandmother.

But there were problems with BWBR, too. As my friend Peter tried to tell me (repeatedly), there is a lot of white privilege involved in taking any other culture — let alone one which has been targeted by your own culture’s oppression — and acting as if it’s mere fodder for a game played by privileged people, and nothing more. Even if you’ve got all the best intentions, it can still be disastrously arrogant, condescending, and demeaning.

And I did have all the best intentions! The people of the Pueblos rose up and did something which is almost unprecedented in North American Native history — they kicked European ass and sent them packing, driving the Spanish out of Nuevo México for ten years. It was a bloody, brutal uprising that took their Christian oppressors by surprise and the priests and governors and settlers fled for their lives back to Mexico City. It’s an awesome story, and one which resonates for me in both a David-vs.-Goliath way, and also righteous revolution against oppression.

As a pacifist, I oppose violence, abstain from it, abhor it. But truthfully, I do realize that I have privilege on my side when I take a firm pacifist stand. I know that my interests will be protected — because I am white, straight-passing, cis-passing, and generally either an actual member of nearly every power majority in the country, or I am easily mistaken for the same — by other people, who do use violence to defend my rights. Cops and soldiers are two examples; for me, as a person of privilege, they defend my rights more often than they take them away — were I a person of color, or poor, or homeless, or physically disabled, or in another country, I would scarcely be so lucky.

What’s more, my benefits are going to continue to me even without violence or the threats of violence; my place in society is secure and nobody is likely to take it away from me in any tangible way (except perhaps even richer white people, but the police and army don’t go after them). So it’s easy for me to sit back and talk about non-violence and not killing anyone and equally condemn all those people who kill to get what they want — whether it be 1300 by aerial bombing or 13 by crude rockets.

And I think because it’s so easy for me to dismiss violence, it also fascinates me — the notion that sometimes there are things you should react to with violence, that there are times in which isn’t only justifiable to kill another person, but pretty much mandatory. When people get pushed to edge of the river, and they choose to turn and fight rather than float out to sea, that is hard stuff for me. That is what challenges me; that is where I find interesting conflict to play out and investigate through roleplaying games. (It’s also probably why I like some frakkin’ remake of Mormons In Space so much too.) I like, as a GM (or SGM!), pushing players to discover not only how to kill their opponents in battle, but why they should do it, and when they shouldn’t, and which costs you pay for each decision.

That resonated very well with Bone White, Blood Red’s themes, although it’s deliberately not spoken about in the first, produced-in-a-little-over-a-week draft that was turned in for Game Chef; in indie RPG/story game circles, they talk about the fruitful void and my way of dealing with issues such as the cost of violence in my games is to not make them explicit in the setting of the game or the game mechanics, but to orbit around them as in Vincent’s diagram. I’m not a good enough designer that I can pull it off reliably when I’m not sitting at the table as the GM, but my intent is to tell stories that examine just how important certain things are to any of us (such as non-violence, or our own lives) and whether we’re willing to give them up to survive, to be free, to make the world better. And whether that actually works.

All good questions. But here’s the problem.

I wasn’t using my story to explore those concepts. I was using someone else’s story and bending and twisting and mutilating it into my own narrative about the price and cost of violence, and I didn’t care whether those people minded or not. The peoples of the Pueblos were just generic game pieces in a supposedly “universal” conflict that I was expecting players of the game to pick up, use, learn whatever I wanted the players to learn, and then discard to move along to the next game. Sure, they might learn that the Pueblo peoples successfully revolted in the 17th century, but BWBR gave no guidance about how to really play as a member of the purported topic of the game; a real Puebloan of 1680 would have quite different values from what uninformed players would expect.

As would, of course, a Puebloan from 2009; American Indian activists are constantly having to remind people that, “Hey, we’re not extinct over here, we really do still exist and aren’t just historical curiosities.” For me, the Pueblo revolt is something I read about in a book and thought was nifty-keen, but for the people in the Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley, it’s more than that. It’s about their lives; it’s about their families; it’s about them.

I actually knew that by reading David Roberts’ compelling The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion that Drove the Spanish out of the Southwest”. Roberts describes repeatedly how his attempts to talk with Puebloans about it were met with the kind of wary silence and guarded answers that tell you that more than 300 years later, it’s still recent with them; it’s still fresh; it’s still about them and is still their story.

But I didn’t care, because it wasn’t about them; I hadn’t met any of them anyway (that I’ve been aware of; I don’t have any Puebloan friends). It was about me making a game, and it would be so extra good because hey, I could tell people that this was letting everyone know about the peoples of the Pueblos and how they murdered priests in all sorts of gruesome ways once they’d had more than enough of being oppressed!

Because, naturally, it’s up to some white person who has never been to a Rio Grande Valley pueblo to decide exactly what is interesting (and by exclusion, not interesting) about Puebloan peoples and how easy it is to pretend to be one if you have lots of beads on strings. Hey, this is GAMING here, and GAME DESIGN is WRITING — I use a word processor, it must be! — and that’s like ART. And nobody can say that ART is wrong to create, especially if your heart is pure! And the only possible alternative to just doing whatever I want with the story that other people are still living is, I imagined, is to not ever write about non-white people, ever! That’ll show ‘em!

Peter (stoneself on LJ; I mentioned him way up at the start of this post) tried to talk me out of this, and as he often does, attempted to hand-hold me through the baby steps of realizing why cultural appropriation is wrong, presumptive, and privileged. But it’s hard to see these things in your own work, and harder still to hear it from a dear friend who you are frustrating; I think it’s often easier to take privilege checks from a complete stranger or someone you know only tangentially than from someone you love. And predictably enough, I didn’t listen to Peter, and I just got angry and hurt (and he got hurt and frustrated), and it messed up a long-standing friendship real bad for a while.

A year or so ago, I thought I had it figured out, but I think I still had a very shallow understanding. It wasn’t until just this week, when delux_vivens made a post on deadbrowalking that linked to the blog American Indians in Children’s Literature by Debbie Reese, a Nambe Pueblo schoolteacher who currently teaches at UIUC’s American Indian Studies program.

Reese and other Native American educators, librarians, and authors have recently focused on Beth Kanell’s book “Darkness Under the Water”, purportedly about the Abenaki people of Vermont and the forced sterilizations imposed on them by white people in the 1930s or so.

Kanell apparently uses the Vermont Eugenics Project as a backdrop to tell her own story in this young-adult novel, which has nothing to do with the Vermont Eugenics Project and in fact pushes misrepresentations of what it was really all about. Debbie Reese writes:

The book is not about the Vermont Eugenics Project. It’s a melodramatic mystery set in the past that uses the Vermont Eugenics Project to, as the author said on child-lit, “create a climate of fear” for her characters to live within.

Create a climate of fear?!

That’s a gross violation of the Abenaki people, what they endured then, and what they continue to deal with in the present day. I wonder if the Abenaki family Kanell references knows that she used their stories to “create a climate of fear”? She used that family, and she used that history to create a melodramatic mystery that is being marketed as historical fiction. She used them and she used it for her own purposes.

Others, not just Reese, have spoken up about this, and many of them are Native American; Doris Seale and Judy Dow, a retired children’s librarian and an ethnobiology teacher — and both of them of Abenaki ancestry — wrote an essay about why they felt so misrepresented and dehumanized by the appropriation and misrepresentation by a YA fiction novel of a horror and pain that targeted their own families:

And that’s the heart of the problem: What we had was bad enough. Our people were picked up as “feeble-minded” and institutionalized, sometimes for life. Our children were taken away from our families, and our families had absolutely no recourse. In these institutions both men and women were sterilized, because someone had decided that to let them reproduce would contaminate Vermont’s breeding stock. Whole families scattered across New England and never saw each other again. Some were captured in other states and then institutionalized. An old, old grief: broken families, lost futures, people growing up not knowing who they are because their parents will not tell them they are Indians—for their own protection. Not over. Not done. Now. Still. If you are Indian, there is no guarantee that you are safe.

This is the history, the legacy that Kanell has appropriated for her venture into young adult historical fiction. Such a sensational story obscures, ignores, and even functions to belittle the deep and enduring wounds that continue to poison our families and communities today. If Kanell had created characters who were authentic for the time and place and subject matter; if she had left out the graphic and gratuitous brutality; if she had chosen to make appropriate use of Nancy Gallagher’s material, whose work she cites; if she had understood—or cared—how tragic the Eugenics Survey has been for an entire nation of people; if she had shown any comprehension of what it has meant to be Abenaki in Vermont; even with her stilted, cliché-ridden writing, had she even chosen just to tell truths, she could have been forgiven.

As it stands, Darkness Under the Water is a travesty, a melodrama marketed specifically to young people in Vermont—including Abenaki young people—who will probably be told this is how it was. Since young adult historical fiction is often used to supplement textbook versions of history, Darkness Under the Water will probably turn up on Vermont reading lists, and will probably win awards. And our Abenaki mothers will probably continue to cut their daughters’ hair so they will be safe. And our Abenaki people will probably continue to “hide in plain sight.” And the cycle of hatred and denial will continue.

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In collaboration with Nancy Gallagher, Doris and Judy have conducted extensive research into the eugenics movement in Vermont, including the Vermont Eugenics Survey. Over several generations, Judy’s was the largest family specifically targeted by the Eugenics Survey, and Doris’s was caught in the aftermath a generation later. </p>

Beth Kanell

How did Kanell respond?

Here is Beverly Slapin’s final point in a post that eviscerates Kanell’s reply:

Kanell writes (to “American Indians in Children’s Literature,” Debbie Reese’s blog, Dec. 7, 2008):

“Judy and Doris, I’m sorry that you’ve been dismayed by some misreadings of the story…perhaps you are not a frequent reader of ‘young adult’ fiction, where some suggestions of fear and horror are not always matched by the also presented facts. A reader needs to sort through what is being presented.”

So, in effect, Kanell’s saying, “It’s not my fault that the two Abenaki critics misunderstood what I wrote.” Point of information: Doris Seale, before her retirement, was a children’s librarian for over 45 years, and Judy Dow has been a teacher for more than 25 years. It’s more than likely that both Abenaki women know how to read and interpret young adult fiction, even poorly written ones such as Darkness Under the Water.

It may not have been Kanell’s intent to falsify the eugenics movement in Vermont in such an egregious manner; it may not have been Kanell’s intent to miseducate the children of Vermont; it may not have been Kanell’s intent to shame Abenaki people; I have no way of knowing. But when Kanell creates a melodramatic ghost story that distorts a piece of history that continues to strike the hearts of Abenaki families; when every single one of Kanell’s Abenaki characters misunderstand what’s happening to them; when Kanell condescendingly dismisses the words of Abenaki educators who point out what she has done—then her very intentions are suspect.

For me, that last sentence hits home with respect to Bone White, Blood Red — I don’t know exactly what role the Pueblo Revolt plays in the hearts and minds of the people of the Pueblos. I didn’t think to ask before writing, either, but I knew from reading Roberts that it was still something that meant something to them. And I decided to create my own story game anyway, and ignore anything besides my own desire to “make a great game” that will “feature non-European characters” and challenge the (white, male, and/or American) players to “confront the cost and price of resistance.” My lofty goals overlooked entirely the real peoples of the Rio Grande Valley in 1680.

I went out to that part of Neuvo México last year; on a vacation, I stayed in the town that “Ripe Squash” (Po’Pay) drove Governor Antonio de Otermin from and claimed as his own capital. I walked past the walls that remain from that day, when it’s said that a leader of the Revolt offered the besieged Spaniards a choice of two banners: a white flag of peace, surrender, and exile, or a red flag of bloody death.

I visited as many Pueblos as I could — some to take pictures, of the land and the trees and the rivers and the buildings and the sky (but never the people), but most just to look and get a sense of being there. I met some of the peoples of the Pueblo — one man at San Ildefonso Pueblo pointed to the mountainous outcropping of rock north of their town. “That,” he told me, without knowing of my interests, “is where our people went during the Pueblo Revolt and took refuge from the Spanish on the Black Mesa.” For him, the Pueblo Revolt wasn’t just something in a book he picked up in a library and read in a week; it was something that happened to his family, and thus to him.

One more quote from Debbie Reese to wrap this up:

An oft-posed question: “Who can tell your stories?”

[...]

There is no easy answer.

Some years ago (note I didn’t say “many moons ago”) I was at a children’s literature conference. Illustrator James Ransome was a guest speaker. He was asked why he had not illustrated any books about American Indians. His reply was something like “I haven’t held their babies.”

Consider that simple statement and what it embodies.

If I trust you, I will let you hold my baby. Foremost in my mind is that she is vulnerable. I don’t want her hurt in any way. I don’t let just anyone hold her. I have to trust that you will not hurt her.

If you are a storyteller, what is your relationship with, for example, the Pueblo people. Are you retelling Pueblo stories? Do you know any Pueblo people? Have you held their babies?

I have held no Pueblo babies; I have not been to the top of the Black Mesa. Pretty much nobody who would ever play Bone White, Blood Red has, also. These aren’t our stories; they aren’t our babies, and I sure can’t give anyone else permission to hold the babies of the men and women who climbed the Black Mesa.

For that reason, I’m not going to do any further game development on Bone White, Blood Red, although I’d been planning a rewrite and eventual publication for almost two years; it just wouldn’t be right. The game system is neat, and the writing is some of my better RPG work — but I can use the game mechanic ideas in some other game, some other setting, something new and wonderful and good. And just you wait and see — it’ll be fantastic.