Mistral - you are a veritable encyclopedia of SFF! Thanks, the Merlin stories sound quite intriguing.
I hope I dont get a hold of the tardus or some scientist doesn't give me the ability to do that, because I probably would....
and it would be the native american's... think about it... our government is based on a indian form of government. they were close to having a the written language... they had a language recognized from east to west coast... the sign language... given the horse a lot earlier then it was introduced... the whites would have never kicked the indian's off their lands...
Would it be cultural genocide to put up a forcefield across the Bering Land Bridge 30,000 years ago and prevent the migrations of the Native American's ancestors from Asia? They would have had to double back into Asia and what would have heppened then????
American archeology is kind of a hobby of mine, and some current theories, while still debatable, believe that settlement of the Americas happened in at least three waves - one over the Bering land bridge, and two by sea - Asians following the coastline from Siberia, along the Aleutians and then down the west coast of the Americas. This would explain how the migration from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego happened as quickly as it did (too quickly, it seems, for mere expansion of population across the continents) as well as uncanny similarities in decoration between potteries in Mexico and Japan during prehistoric times.
So just blocking the land bridge probably wouldn't work at all. Interesting thought though.
How did this thread end up being all about alternate histories? I thought the original poster was asking about fantasy fiction based in Native American mythology.
One tenuous example might be the Gargoyles animated series, whose assortment of supernatural beings included Coyote the trickster. Perhaps searching for terms like "Coyote" and "Raven" along with "fantasy fiction" or the like might point in the right direction.
I've done searches now in about 16 different permutations and have turned up very little. There's one well-regarded tale about a bear who wakes up as a twelve year old girl because her mother was human and her father a bear-god, which is set in the Pacific Northwest, writen by an anthropologist. This is along the lines of what I'm thinking of, though it sounds fairly intimate in scale. But mostly all I've found related to Native American fantasy, is the
Magical Native American trope.
There are several AU stories, as noted above. But what I'm really looking for is, say, a kind of Lord of the Rings of the Americas. That is, the way LotR was an effort to create a native mythological epic for England based on the Norse sagas, I'm wondering about a native mythological epic based on the particular mythological inflections of the Americas. I mean, it's pretty good material. We're working with several Aztec objects right now, all of which are highly sacred objects from the Templo Mayor in Tenochtitlan and the mythology attached to them is marvelous. I'm rather fascinated by the idea of lost history. Since I've started working with the ancient world in my current job, I've become very aware of how little we actually know about the ancient world. Scholars estimate we know only 5% of all there is to know about the Romans - about the
Romans who we know scads and scads about! Meaning the imaginative possiblities of what we don't know about the Americas (of which we probably know 0.25% or less of what there is to know) are pretty stunning.
On top of that, I'm bored beyond belief with fantasy set in Medieval European ideas and spawned of LotR, and really, really bored with contemporary urban fantasy with vampires, werewolves and faeries. Really - is this all we've got?
or Robert Sawyer's Hominid trilogy.
