Stories Are Weapons

Stories Are Weapons by Annalee Newitz is the first book I'm blogging about in October.  Since I'm starting this post not quite halfway through the month, there's a possibility that I may post again before the month ends.  I'd like to post more on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer.   We'll see what happens.

                                            

 

A book with the title Stories Are Weapons sounds like it will be disturbing.  Some readers who have not been paying attention to what's been going on in the United States may find it disturbing.  If you have been following American current events , you will not be surprised by what Newitz has to tell us.  Although I didn't find the book surprising, I did find it tremendously insightful which is why I would give it the grade of A+ or five stars on Goodreads.

When I ran a search on my Goodreads books, I discovered that this is the second book I've read by Annalee Newitz.  I read her novel The Future of Another Timeline toward the end of 2019 and gave it a very enthusiastic five stars.   So my currently limited memory is the reason I'd forgotten that I read it.  It's not a comment on the quality of the The Future of Another Timeline.   In fact, it got the Best Fiction of 2019 award from me on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer.

Newitz mentions that she could get arrested in some U. S. states for being in drag.  I wondered if these were states where women wearing pants (which is extremely common in the U.S.) is considered "drag".  I am a woman who wears pants more often than not. The Britannica has an article on the subject  here.  Apparently, women wearing pants is no longer considered drag. This seems to have happened in the 1930's.  I feel that this is an important shift.  I personally didn't wear pants until some point during my sophomore year of high school. Until then I wore skirts and dresses.

I had once been a huge fan of James Fenimore Cooper who wrote in the first half of the 19th century.  He wrote The Last of the Mohicans. Newitz considers this classic book a piece of propaganda because the Mohicans weren't disappearing.  In fact, there currently are Mohicans  who are alive in Wisconsin.  

Another Native American people, the Cherokee, sued the state of Georgia over being removed as part of what later became known as the Trail of Tears.  The case was Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, and it went  all the way to the Supreme Court.  The Supreme Court ruled that the Cherokee were not a sovereign nation like foreign states, and therefore didn't have the right to litigate in a court of law.  Yet to my great astonishment I learned from the Wikipedia article on Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that the Supreme Court ruled a year later in Worcester v. Georgia that the Cherokee Nation was sovereign.  Chief Justice John Marshall made the decision in both cases.  I guess that our first Supreme Court Chief Justice simply changed his mind.  I'm glad that he did.

I think that it's bizarre that some 19th century Caucasian Americans believed that Indigenous Americans weren't "Real Indians" if they weren't hunter gatherers which is what they'd been two hundred years previously.  This is why Indians were nonsensically thought to be extinct.  Newitz comments "It would be like insisting that a current day Londoner wasn't truly British unless they spoke Shakespearean English."

Newitz mentions a book called Education For Extinction by David Wallace Hamilton dealing with Indian boarding schools.  Adams wrote  with apparent approval of these schools that  it costs almost a million dollars to kill an Indian in a war, but only  $1200 to give an Indian child eight years of education in a boarding school.  Newitz compares the Indian boarding schools to POW camps.  I thought that was a very valid comparison.

So Indian nations promulgated a revolutionary movement that allowed them to return to their past.  It was called the Ghost Dance.  This was taking place in the context of Indian dancing having been made illegal.  They wanted to dance back the old pre-contact world which existed before European colonists arrived in North America.  Newitz calls the Ghost Dance "a spiritual revival and a protest movement".  They opposed White reservation authorities, refused to speak English, avoided Christian churches and prevented their children from going to residential schools.  I imagine that they must have hidden their children from the authorities.  The newspapers in 1890 portrayed the Ghost Dance as a war dance.  Yet James Mooney, a government anthropologist, said that the Ghost Dance was peaceful.  Nevertheless, Sitting Bull was arrested for allowing the Ghost Dance to be performed on Standing Rock Reservation.  He resisted arrest, and was shot by a police officer.

When Florida's Parental Rights in Education Bill AKA "Don't Say Gay" came up in the book, I ran a search to find out how many states had "copycat" bills progressing through their legislatures.  There have been 42 similar bills in 22 states.  So it's still a minority of states who have such bills advancing through their legislatures, but it's edging up to half the states.  This reflects the sharp political divisions in my country.  

It's interesting that a U.S. bakery who had no gay customers against whom the owner would like to discriminate, took such a case all the way to the Supreme Court and won.  Newitz points out that the baker had no standing in the case.  No one was asking this baker not to discriminate. The Supreme Court shouldn't have taken it, but they did.  Now we have a Supreme Court precedent in favor of discrimination against LGBT citizens in the United States. 

Newitz deals with complaints about Amazon's Rings of Power being historically inaccurate by pointing out that it's fantasy.  There is no history involved. There is such a thing as historical fantasy that takes place in a real historical time and place.  Yet Rings of Power, like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, takes place in a fantasy realm.  I've also never understood these types of criticism of fantasy.  Historical accuracy is irrelevant when you're talking about fictional people and places.

Stories Are Weapons deals with such interesting concepts and is overflowing with information that was previously unknown to me.  If this book isn't my best read of the year, it will certainly be among my top reads for 2024.