Buffalo God in American Gods comics

AMERICAN GODS Adapted For Comics By DARK HORSE

Comment:  This announcement helpfully includes an image of the figure who's sort of the elder god of the American continent.

A Buffalo God with a Pacific Northwest tattoo and a super-tomahawk? Looks like pan-Indian stereotypes to me.

For more on the subject, see America "Not a Good Country for Gods"?

Gaiman wrong on Graveyard Book

As you may recall, this controversy bubbled up a few weeks ago. In a speech, author Neil Gaiman explained that he set The Graveyard Book in England because, he implied, America was empty 250-plus years ago. Educator Debbie Reese criticized this presumption. Gaiman posted a response saying he meant America's graveyards were empty 250-plus years ago. Readers took umbrage with Reese's critique, saying she was being "politically correct" and hypersensitive to imagined slights.

I happened to come across The Graveyard Book at the library, so I "read" it (listened to it on CD). Now I can report authoritatively on the Gaiman/Reese contretemps. Reese and her supporters were right; Gaiman and his defenders were wrong.

The setup

You can learn more about The Graveyard Book here. But all you need to know about the story is this: A boy named Nobody "Bod" Owens is raised in an English graveyard by ghosts and a vampire.

Most of the cemetery's English inhabitants died within the last 250 years, but a few date to Renaissance times and one or two to the Middle Ages. However, the story doesn't require English ghosts older than 250 years. It would've worked about as well with American ghosts of that vintage.

As I noted before, there are cemeteries in New England and Virginia with four centuries of history. And cemeteries in Florida and the Southwest with more. There's no good reason for Gaiman's 250-year cutoff date.

But never mind. Even if it's not necessary, the English setting is arguably better. Bod can interact with a millennium of ghosts with the same language, culture, and ethnicity. There's no sudden break as there was in America in 1492.

Gaiman doesn't tell us where Silas the vampire was born. But he hints Silas may have come from eastern Europe, the "birthplace" of vampirism. It's possible Silas is supposed to be Dracula of Transylvania after he repented his evil ways. In any case, Silas and his Romanian associate Miss Lupescu are another reason to set the story in Europe.

The problem

The problem comes with two characters who are necessary to the plot: a Roman ghost who's 2,000 years old and an even older Celtic ruler, the Indigo Man, who's buried beneath a hill.

As far as I know, there are no English cemeteries that contain 1,000 years of English souls, the remains of a Roman soldier, and a Celtic tomb. I imagine such a site would be a national archaeological treasure--as valuable as Stonehenge and Westminster Abbey combined. Which is why I think no such site exists.

Of course, Gaiman was free to invent a cemetery built on top of Celtic and Roman grounds. But that's where the difficulty arises. He could've invented a similar cemetery in America. It could've had a 1,000-year-old Viking ghost who referred to a 2,000-year-old Indian tomb. Or a 2,000-year-old Indian ghost who referred to a 4,000-year-old Indian tomb.

Indeed, the Indian ghost could've referred to a stranger from the "Old World"--perhaps a Phoenician or Egyptian who managed to cross the ocean. The buried Indigo Man even could've been someone from mythical Atlantis.

I'm not actually advocating one of these alternatives. If an Indian were buried in the tomb, Gaiman would've had to invent a supernatural belief system about dark curses and demonic spirits. We've had enough of those stories without adding one more.

No, I think Gaiman made the right artistic choice. But we're talking about his justification for that choice in his speech. That's where he went wrong.

Britain full, America empty?

The point is this: America and its graveyards weren't empty. They were just as inhabited as their English counterparts. Considering how Europe was depopulated during the Black Plague, it wouldn't surprise me if America's eastern seaboard was more populated than the contemporary English countryside.

According to Wikipedia, Europe had an estimated 25-30 million people at the time of Charlemagne. England supposedly had a population of about 1 million in 1086. Meanwhile, the Americas had an estimated population of 10 to 100 million. Many of those lived along the coasts and waterways.

The population of the mid-Atlantic states (including New York) is roughly comparable to the population of Great Britain today. Both have about 60 million people. For all I know, the two populations have been roughly equal for 1,000 or 10,000 years.

Gaiman's use of Roman and Celtic characters proves he wasn't just talking about a single cemetery's confines. If he had been, he could've used Indian characters instead. He was implying that the whole continent was mostly empty. That England had a suitable history and prehistory for his story and America didn't.

To reiterate: Gaiman's assertion that he couldn't identify an American cemetery older than 250 years is flatly wrong. His implication that (civilized) people have inhabited Britain but not America for thousands of years is also flatly wrong. Gaiman made a mistake and Reese rightly called him on it.

Summing it up: Reese 1, Gaiman 0. Better luck next time you talk about Indians, Neil.

Rob's review

Despite the controversy, The Graveyard Book is a fine story. I don't know that I'd give it the Hugo and Newbery Awards, but I don't know that I wouldn't. I'd have to see the competition first.

Gaiman wrote it as a series of chapters paralleling Kipling's Just So Stories, and it shows. Some of the episodes seem more like diversions than integral parts of the story. And since it features murder and attempted murder, I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for young children. But overall it's an enchanting story full of invention and imagination, just as the critics have said.

Rob's rating: 8.5 of 10.

For more on the "empty land" stereotype, see Europeans Keep Discovering Newfoundland and Vanished Mound Builders in The Prairies. For more on good literature, see The Best Indian Books.

Below:  Empty America, where the deer, the antelope, and the buffalo played without human intervention.

Neil Gaiman on "dead Indians"

In a 2008 interview, author Neil Gaiman discussed his novel The Graveyard Book:"The Graveyard Book” is a metaphor for life, family and leaving home, Gaiman says. The book opens with a baby boy escaping an assassin who has massacred his parents and older sister. The boy totters to a decrepit cemetery, where he’s adopted by ghosts, christened Nobody Owens (Bod for short) and given the Freedom of the Graveyard.

"Essentially, the world of the graveyard is this glorious extended family,” says Gaiman, who chose a British cemetery as the book’s setting so Bod could interact with historic characters.

"The great thing about having an English cemetery is I could go back a very, very, very long way. And in America, you go back 250 years (in a cemetery), and then suddenly you’ve got a few dead Indians, and then you don’t have anybody at all, unless you decide to set it up in Maine or somewhere and sneak in some Vikings.”Educator Debbie Reese posted her thoughts on Gaiman's comment about Indians:"A few dead Indians"--Given his reference to 250+ years ago, we can assume he's thinking of 1750 or thereabouts. In fact, by 1750, millions were dead due to warfare and disease. Estimates of the population of American Indians range from 18 million (Henry F. Dobyns estimate) to 75 million (Russel Thornton's estimate).

"...and then you don't have anybody at all" suggests the continent was an empty land. In fact, prior to European contact, there were thriving Native communities all across the continent. At Nambe (my Native Nation), we established ourselves at our current village location in 1300. Before that, we were in other, nearby villages, and before that, the Pueblo people were in places like Mesa Verde, Bandelier, and Chaco Canyon.Gaiman responds

Gaiman posted a response to Reese on her blog:I was replying to a specific question about European-style graveyards in the US and who you'd find in them and why I didn't set THE GRAVEYARD BOOK in America, which was that they didn't go back far enough, and they didn't give me the dead people I wanted for the story to work. Obviously (or obviously to me) I wasn't saying or implying that the country was uninhabited prior to the arrival of Europeans, or trying to somehow render invisible hundreds of millions of people who had inhabited this content for tens of thousands of years--especially after having very specifically written about them, and about that timespan in American Gods.

(And, of course, European Graveyards in the US go back much further than 250 years.)

A more sensible answer to why I didn't set The Graveyard Book in America was that I didn't want to, but I had a microphone stuck in front of my face by the Hornbook in front of a crowd of people at Book Expo or ALA, and I babbled.

Also apologies to any Icelandic or Norwegian readers who are offended by my imprecision. Obviously none of the Newfoundland settlers were Vikings.Commenters joined in, with some taking Gaiman's side:Angel Of Wrath said...

I'm part Native American and I didn't really glean any sort of racist lean from what he said.

And I'm really sick of people looking for reasons to be offended.

There are so many other travesties going on in the world today, you should better save your time trying to call attention to them and not caring so much about what an author says.

Get offended because gay marriage is still illegal in most states, get upset about the recession...do something a touch more productive. Seriously.

Taylor said...

Debbie, to put it bluntly, you need to calm down.

Neil's not discounting the deaths of millions of Native Americans. You jumped the gun, acted out of emotion, and didn't pause to really read what he said. There were no Native Americans being buried in European-style graveyards. Of course not.

What he was getting at is that a graveyard in England can go back a couple thousand years, to early AD, when the Romans first settled Britannia and earlier. There is more history. There are more peoples.And some taking Reese's:Anonymous said...

"And in America, you go back 250 years (in a cemetery), and then suddenly you've got a few dead Indians, and then you don't have anybody at all..." How could this not be read as anything except ignorant? Dr. Reese is not being emotional here. Mr. Gaiman specifically said "a few dead Indians." It's so tiring and stupid for people to continue to imagine that history in the Americas only began when Europeans invaded. Maybe Mr. Gaiman should have just specified that he wanted to write a book about werewolves or vampires or whatever and chose to situate the book in Europe since that continent has a long literary tradition peopled with such mythical creatures. That would have been preferable to disparaging Native peoples, as he did in the initial interview.

Anonymous said...

I like how so many of these comments essentially crack up to "how could you be such a jerk? Why would the phrase "a few dead Indians" be offensive? It doesn't offend me, and my great-great-great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess! Get over being a minority, because none of us can relate, and you're just picking on famous person of the week."

If people don't know why a comment that SOUNDED LIKE it downplayed the mass genocide of a people could be offensive, then I don't know what to say. The OP could only take this comment in the context it was given where she first saw it. Neil explained its original context and it then made sense. But, in the context as it was from the blog she got it from, it seemed pointless and sensationalist to use the phrase "a few dead Indians," which, historically, has been used malevolently. Not to mention that it makes it seem that Indians are a thing of the past, and that there aren't currently millions of those Indians buried in European-esque cemeteries, thousands more with every passing year.

It must be nice to be unaffected by the constant derogatory comments about NAs, and to never have to wonder if someone you may respect is making one. I love Neil Gaiman, but he really worded this poorly. Full stop. It seems like a lot of you are just being troll-y to get into his good graces.(Excerpted from Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature, 4/18/10.)

Rob weighs in

I understand the point Gaiman was trying to make. I think he did it poorly enough to deserve the criticism he got. In other words, I'm on Reese's side.

First, to reiterate the obvious, European history in North America goes back 500 years, not 250. By 1750 there were substantial European settlements along the Atlantic coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific coast as well as the Southwest and the Great Lakes area.

Some of the European settlements were built on top of Indian settlements. The Europeans might've buried their dead where the Indians previously buried their dead. So the "European-style graveyards" might have Indians buried informally, if not formally, in the same grounds. That would work fine for a story about ghosts inhabiting a graveyard.

More to the point, Europeans and Indians quickly began mingling in the same settlements. From 1550 to 1750 they were cohabitants in California, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida, and from 1625 to 1750 in New England, New York, Virginia, and on down the coast.

In some cases Indians joined the settlements voluntarily, became Spanish or English citizens, and intermarried with the foreigners. In other cases they were enslaved or forced into servitude. The Europeans coaxed them to convert to Christianity, after which they could receive a proper Christian burial. Pocahontas is merely the most famous example of an Indian who could've been buried in a European-style cemetery in America. (She's actually buried in England.)

Indeed, New Englanders created "praying towns" for the converted Indians to live in. Yes, towns full of Christianized Indians. Presumably their European-style graveyards had as many Indians as Englishmen.

Gaiman:  right or wrong?

True, few of these old graveyards remain. So technically speaking, Gaiman is correct. Few of the American cemeteries established by Europeans go back before 1750.

But in a broader sense, he's incorrect. With his "Vikings" comment, he clearly implied that America was uninhabited between 1000 and 1750. At best his remarks grossly oversimplified the complex history of pre-Colonial America.

I presume he knows about Columbus and the Pilgrims, but it's not clear what else he knows about this period. In his MARVEL 1602 comic-book series, he wrote about an alternate timeline where the Roanoke Colony of North Carolina survived. In this universe, the New World was populated by a few shadowy Indians and dinosaurs.

This suggests Gaiman's attitude toward American history. Until his English ancestors came over and started civilizing the place, America was a mythical land. Indians, dinosaurs, monsters, and gods all mingled in a prehistoric Neverland. There were no cultures here with burial grounds or cemeteries--just forests and plains with Indians running free like animals.

Incidentally, Angel of Wrath's opinion that we shouldn't spend time correcting historical mistakes and stereotypes is just plain stupid. Experts have noted the harm of Native stereotyping again and again. Angel may be ignorant of why stereotyping is one of the most significant issues facing Indians, but we aren't.

For more on the subject, see The Best Indian Books.