I rode into Asheville, North Carolina, for all the wrong reasons, from the wrong direction, on a borrowed bike, with no weapons, ready to work for the vamps again.
Now that’s an opening sentence. Setting, tone, character, genre—it’s all here. Southern United States, character with big issues, signals of cool in bike and weapons, and aha! Must be urban fantasy. Whoever it is is working for the vamps, which as we all know, genre fans, means vampires.
Faith Hunter knows how to pull a reader in. Her Jane Yellowrock series has been hugely popular for the past decade and more, and it’s earned its popularity. It hits the notes it needs to hit. Like all good genre fiction, it knows its tropes, it uses them well, and it puts its own spin on them.
Jane’s world is urban-fantasy classic. It does its vampires Anne Rice-style: They’ve always been with us, they’re drop-dead gorgeous, and Jane has a close personal relationship with a powerful vampire based in New Orleans. This world’s werewolves are dependent on the moon, they run in packs, and they’re vicious killers. There are other organized groups of shapeshifters, notably the black wereleopards of Africa. There are covens of witches everywhere; witches are, like vamps and weres, something other than human, though there can be human siblings in witch lineages.
And there’s Jane, who is a skinwalker. Jane is Cherokee, born before the Trail of Tears, with a story to explain how she’s still a young woman in the twenty-first century. Her brand of shifter needs genetic material from an animal in order to shift into that animal: skin, teeth, bone. DNA is the key here; according to the rules of Hunter’s world, shifters have always been aware of the snake inside the skin, the double helix.
In a further nod to contemporary science, a shifter has to make up mass if she shifts to a larger animal, and shed it if she shifts to a smaller one. It’s most efficient and least costly to the shifter if she defaults to animals that are roughly her own human size. Which for Jane means, for the most part, a mountain lion.
So far that’s fairly standard. But there’s a twist to Jane’s shifter identity. She shares body and mind with a second, independent consciousness, which she calls Beast. Beast was bound to her by black magic, and they’re bound for life. Jane still needs cougar DNA to shift into that form, but as long as she has even a tooth handy, she can shift at will.
There are rules and restrictions, and one great advantage. She shifts most easily around the full moon. Once she shifts, she’s confined to animal form until sunrise the next day. When Beast is dominant, she’s all cat, though Jane can influence her behavior. If Jane is wounded, she can use the shift to heal herself. She pays a price in pain, but it keeps her alive and functioning long after she might otherwise be dead.
It’s an intricate, complex world she lives in, and Hunter has expanded it, so far, to fifteen novels and numerous shorter pieces. I dipped into volume four, in which Jane contends with a crisis among the vampires, werewolves on a revenge-killing spree, and a witch gone seriously bad. Demon-compact-level bad.
What makes it stand out for me is its extensive network of female friendships. As a commenter noted on a previous post, adventure novels with Strong Female Characters—Mercy Thompson, for example—have a habit of defaulting to Smurfette Syndrome. There’s one Strong Female Character, and her friends and allies are male. Female characters are there to be rescued, or they’re villains or rivals, or they’re crowd extras. They aren’t part of the protagonist’s friend network.
Jane has female friends and chosen family, and they’re very dear to her. In Raven Cursed, she’s cut off from them by a combination of her own actions and the various crises that swirl around them, and it hurts her deeply. Her best friend is a witch; the witch’s family are Jane’s chosen family, and they have a freewheeling, sometimes contentious, loving and supportive relationship with one another. When one of them goes bad, it shakes the whole family to its heart.
They’re not Jane’s only friends, either. She’s actively sought out by a human member of the vampire clan, who honestly wants to be her friend. Jane is willing to entertain the notion, though she’s ambivalent. She started as a vampire hunter; she may be working for them now, but she’s not terribly fond of them. Still, female friendship is important to her, and she values it wherever she finds it.
That includes the female who lives inside her. Beast is all cat, but she’s comfortable with her human symbiote. She accepts their connection; she doesn’t challenge its existence, nor does Jane spend her life suppressing her animal instincts.
The one thing that may start to wear on the reader after a while is the way Jane avoids revealing what she is. A very few people know that she’s a skinwalker; quite a few more mutter portentously at intervals, “What are you, anyway?” It’s a big deal if someone figures out that the big kitty who saved them from the big bad is Jane. Since there’s never any question about who the vampires or the witches or the werewolves or the wereleopards are, I’m not sure why it’s so essential that nobody know about Jane.
But that’s a quibble. Jane and her Beast and her friends and allies, especially her female friends, are a grand cast of memorable characters. Their interpersonal dramas are as compelling as the magical and supernatural ones—sometimes more so. Jane, like a cat, is not exactly monogamous, and she moves among a delectable assortment of actual and potential mates and partners. It’s great fun.
Judith Tarr is a lifelong horse person. She supports her habit by writing works of fantasy and science fiction as well as historical novels, many of which have been published as ebooks. She’s written a primer for writers who want to write about horses: Writing Horses: The Fine Art of Getting It Right. She lives near Tucson, Arizona with a herd of Lipizzans, a clowder of cats, and a blue-eyed dog.
I know this comment seems contentious, but I really want to know if fiction writers and publishers think about this as a problem or challenge. Has anyone talked with Ms. Hunter, or Ms. Briggs about cultural appropriation? I enjoy both these authors, but it feels strange to read an indigenous experience written from a non-indigenous point of view. It’s feels as if both characters’ ethnicities are gratuitous– they are defined as native in order to make them more exotic.
It’s possible the authors are native or have experience living inside native culture or experience, in which case I withdraw the comment. Their bios and wikis don’t mention any tribal affiliation. It’s interesting to compare Hunter and Briggs to Rebecca Roanhorse’s recent work with Dine mythologies. I looked around for lit crit on this and found none. Has anyone looked into the author’s or critic’s interpretation of appropriation in these novels?
from the wrong direction, on a borrowed bike,
I always default to ‘bike = bicycle’, so was picturing a 10-speed. Or possibly the Stingray I rode as a kid.
@1 I know what you’re saying, and I’ve had similar thoughts. But both Hunter and Briggs are writing about specifically Native forms of shapeshifters. Hunter in particular.
When both series began, writers weren’t as well aware of the issues you’re talking about. The popularity of this series has meant that it’s persisted into what I think is a more vibrant and positive climate of marginalized writers speaking up and gaining prominence. Hunter does try very hard to get her research right. That’s a point in her favor.
@1 This may interest you. From 2015, just about when people were starting to ask these questions.
https://www.jimchines.com/2015/03/not-your-mystical-indian-mcdonald/
From what I understand in the books, and this is a pretty much a big spoiler, but the reason Jane takes great care to avoid people finding out about her true nature is that she’s not just a skin walker, but an abomination in the eyes of her culture. As a child, on the point of death, she panicked and completely absorbed, body and soul, Beast. That’s why she’s immortal, that’s why she has a separate entity inside her. Instead of just copying the DNA, she’s stolen something divine and removed Beast from the the natural order of things. Her grandmother didn’t blame blame her for it, as she was just a child, but really drummed into her that she had to keep it secret, so she does so to the point of mania, even though she’s faced supernatural threats far worse than what is. I *think* most skin walkers who do this don’t reach an accord like Beast and Jane have, and the conflicts between the instincts of the human mind and soul with the animal mind and soul results in them eventually becoming violently insane, hence the cultural taboo against it.
#1: I can’t speak to Ms. Briggs’ precise ethnicity, but I have met her more than once at conventions here in the Northwest, and indeed I believe I recall her on at least one “writing the Other” panel in that context. I know that she has lived for a number of years in the precise part of southeastern Washington in which the Mercy Thompson books are primarily set – and I personally have a decent knowledge of that region, both by virtue of my father’s side of the family having settled there early in the western-migration era and because I went to college in that area myself. For more on my family’s history and associations, I refer folks backward to the bottom half of the comment-stream – specifically, to #40 and #56 – of the “All the Myriad Ways” post from the Bestiary back in February, in which I went into somewhat more detail. (I also have a comment among the responses to the post from Jim Hines’ blog cited by our hostess.)
About the Briggs novels – our hostess is right that the cultural-awareness landscape has evolved considerably since Briggs’ first books about Mercy were published. That said, I honestly don’t feel that there’s a cultural-appropriation problem with the series. I say this for two reasons: first, while I haven’t read the entire series, my sense from what I have read, and from my own knowledge of the region’s mythological history, is that the books avoid being so locally specific regarding Native legends as to raise questions of appropriation from living tribal cultures – and what they do include is adapted to fit into the composite environment of the overall series’ background, in which werewolves, vampires, and the nominally Celtic-derived fae folk exist (more or less) side by side with Native powers.
To be more specific, the Coyote in the books who serves as Mercy’s patron spirit and mentor is – like Mercy herself – a solitary creature, portrayed as existing outside everyone else’s cultural hierarchies. He’s not the Yakama or Klickitat Coyote that modern members of those tribal groups might describe, not the somewhat different Coyote in stories told by coastal folk such as the Makah or Haida, and not the “Koyoda Spielei” whose stories my grandfather collected and published in the 1930s, with the blessing and support of a close Native friend.
Briggs’ Coyote is designed as a universal iteration of a figure that shows up in many folkloric traditions, rather than a particular incarnation with direct ties to local folklore. Likewise, the setting Briggs has developed is her own, and its cultural history is written to be specific to that fictional setting. The geography of the books is strongly informed by real-world geography, but the folklore of Mercy’s world isn’t meant to be mapped or regarded as equivalent to that of the actual Pacific Northwest. Or at least I’m reasonably sure I never met any elves or vampires during my four years in Walla Walla….
@1/Ann McMillan – it feels like that should be a more nuanced conversation than inferring some authors should be printed over others because of their background, as the promoted authors often have feet of clay. For instance, the problem with promoting an author like Rebecca Roanhorse over other authors with (for want of a better all-encompassing term) Native American protagonists (as well as Jane Yellowrock, there’s characters like Joanne Walker from the series by CE Murphy, among a host of others that predate Trail of Lightning), is that Roanhorse has been accused by the Navajo of cultural appropriation.
To her credit, Roanhorse has tried to distance herself from any claims she any authentic experience. While she’s ethnically half-black, half-Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, she was raised by white adoptive parents as white, and only found out her ethnicity differed from her parents accidentally when she was looking at her birth certificate. Since she found out, she’s made no efforts to be formally accepted by any tribe, and the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo people have made it clear they have no connection to her.
She’s married to a Navajo man under American law, not Navajo, and has not been (or applied to be) accepted as a member of the Navajo. So saying that this is somehow a greater qualification over others is like saying an anglicised Botswanan is qualified to write about Zulu mythology because their spouse is a Zulu and they were married under South African law. It’s led some senior members of the Navajo to apply the label of ‘cultural appropriation’ to her work, particularly as they are unhappy with how their mythology is portrayed. How much that’s down to the stories being set in a genre that’s traditionally been regarded by the mainstream as frivolous and adolescent is up for debate, though.
So more nuance is needed. I’m not the claiming to be an expert, but I’m drawing from conversations I’ve already seen about how this. It’s right that we should be asking if an author knows what they are writing about, but we should be examining if that knowledge is displayed in their stories. Is their fictionalised version of a real world culture revealed as nuanced and sympathetic, or is full of stereotypes and caricatures? Do the stories written by an author just ‘less qualified’ take away an opportunity for an author judged ‘more qualified’ to be published, or by showing there’s a market for stories featuring a protagonist of that ethnicity demonstrate there’s a market for those stories, inspiring the ‘more qualified’ authors to write such stories and making it more likely those stories will be be published?
Open questions like these (and I’m not suggesting these are the only questions around this topic) encourage exploring the spectrum around the subject. I don’t likely ‘conversations’ that reduce a subject to a binary. Asking a yes/no question like “is this cultural appropriation?” reduces the conversation to a binary that limits and shuts down discussion.
1. Ann mcmillan, I am always willing to have discussions about my books, my worlds, my characters, and even my ethnicity. But there are more appropriate formats for such discussions than Tor.com, online places where authors and readers can talk and comment back and forth. I recommend my facebook author page and would be willing to post your questions there for open and honest discussion for everyone. Please feel free to contact me to set this up, using my website, faithhunter.net, and the contact option to my assistant.
Faith Hunter
@8 Many thanks! And thanks for Jane Yellowrock and her Beast, too.
One thing about both Mercy and Jane that is relevant to the discussion is that, for different reasons they have been alienated from their cultures. Over nearly the whole of the Yellowrock series there is an arc about her struggles with that fact, and her attempts to reconnect while still trying to keep the secret of her dual identity which would be considered abomination.
I found this series during lockdown (in the UK) and it was a wonderful escape from the realities of that time, so I too am very grateful for the character as well as for the other works by Faith Hunter one of which intersects with the Yellowrock books. Both series gave me a real sense of the places they occur, as well as the very different cultures, so very different to where I live, and meet my highest ctriteria – completely distracting me from my chronic pain. Thank You Faith Hunter!
Oh and thank you for noticing my comment too, Ms Tarr. I am finding the Smurfette Syndrome increasingly irritating as I age, to get a little political, to me it is profoundly anti-feminist and I don’t wish to spend my time or money on such characters.