What Neil Gaiman said...

Oct 10, 2010 Note: If you've reached this page by following a link from Neil Gaiman's "Blog-on-a-train" post, I invite you to read my two responses to his post:
Friday, October 8: "Neil Gaiman on "a few dead Indians"
Sunday, October 10: "Part II---Neil Gaiman on "a few dead Indians"

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In a 2008 interview about his The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman said

"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.”

Really, Mr. Gaiman? Is that what you think?

I'm guessing (or hoping, perhaps) that Mr. Gaiman knows better, and might want to recall those words. Maybe he did recall those words, somewhere...  Has anyone got info on that?

Did anyone say "Uh, Mr. Gaiman..." either directly to him, or maybe on Twitter? Did anyone rebut his remark? On a blog, maybe?

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[UPDATE, SUNDAY EVENING, APRIL 18. Mr. Gaiman submitted a comment in response to my question. His reply is in the comments section at the end of this post, and I am also pasting it below for readers convenience. I am indenting his words and putting them in bold text to set them off from my own words.]

Neil said... 


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.

Sunday, April 18, 2010 6:39:00 PM CDT

 End of update. I will respond in the comments section of the blog.
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Second update: Sunday evening, 9:31 CST, April 18.  As you will read in the comments, there's a lot of analysis of who said what and why. There's several that suggest I'm taking making a mountain out of a molehill. My research of last 36 hours has been analysis of SLJ's Top 100 children's novels. Twenty-three of the 100 have Indian content in them. Some are innocuous, most are not. So it is not a mountain out of a molehill----there's a lot of 'Indian' content in children's books that most people do not SEE. I'm trying to help people SEE it, and stop doing it that way (stereotypically). Click here to see that post.
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And, where is my (not yet read) copy of The Graveyard Book?!

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I'm adding these thoughts (below) after being prompted to do so readers who wrote to me privately, asking me to elaborate on what is wrong with Gaiman's remark.

"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). These figures are on page 27 of Do All Indians Live in Tipis? Here's an excerpt from page 43 of Do All Indians Live In Tipis?: 

Everywhere the Europeans landed, smallpox and other diseases quickly followed. Smallpox arrived as early as 1507 on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean, and the disease devastated the Taino people of the greater Antilles. In the mid-1520s two hundred thousand Andean Indians died. From 1616 to 1619 the disease hit coastal New England, decimating the population; in 1633 a smallpox epidemic struck the Narragansett peoples farther north along the eastern seaboard and quickly spread throughout the colonies. More than ten thousand Huron people of Ontario died. From 1780 to 1782 smallpox traveled through the Great Plains, affecting the Shoshone, Ojibwe, Blackfeet, Cree, Assiniboine, and many others. 

"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. I'm obviously being Pueblo-specific in focusing on Pueblo people, but a visit to the website of a Native Nation will demonstrate their histories, too.

THIRD UPDATE, MONDAY, 11:40 AM.

I am closing comments for this post. They are becoming redundant and not moving the conversation forward. 

FOURTH UPDATE,  WEDNESDAY, 12:47 pm.
I compiled a chronological timeline of blog and LiveJournal posts, and, Tweets by a handful of people on Twitter (including Neil Gaiman).  Please see Following up on "What Neil Gaiman said..."