- Joined
- Jan 2, 2017
As a paleface who's marginally more informed on Native politics than most:This one is making the rounds in one of the communities I'm in. I meant to post it yesterday but Kickstarter was not agreeing with my VPN. Anyway, strap in. This will be a long one.
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Coyote & Crow the Role Playing Game
A science fiction and fantasy tabletop RPG set in a near-future where the Americas were never colonized, created by a team of Natives.www.kickstarter.com
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Man, that's a lot of "WE'RE NATIVES, TRUST US!" all over the page.
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Well, this could be interesting. I wonder how it's going to--
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It's just Storyteller. It's literally just fucking Native American Storyteller.
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There we go, if you're a non-native, you're strongly advised to fuck off an not use some options in the book, even though you're supposed to all be roleplaying native characters.
Do these people understand the concept of "roleplaying"? Also, there are no non-native characters in the setting, since it was "not colonized". So what do you do if you're a non-native playing that game? Just... suck it up and not play some things? That sounds like so much fun, having my options in a game limited by my ancestry!
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A diverse team! Including the absolutely-traditional-not-created-in-the-late-80s native tranny term, the "two spirit". Their ancestors would be so proud!
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This is at the end. Separate but equal, indeed.
These guys are funded over 10 times over. I fully expect the product to come out, but I also fully expect drama. There are great odds of he-said-she-said drama about a non-native team member claiming to be native. What do you guys think?
-If I knew the tribes involved, I'd be able to guess exactly where good drama points could form- even different branches of the same tribe (Cherokee Nation vs. Eastern Band of the Cherokee vs. United Keetowah Band) tend to have very different ideas about the "authentic" Native identity or culture- and that's not getting into the huge circle-jerk arguments that can form over archeological data. Case in point- many Cherokee Nation members insist that the traditional Cherokee belief system was monotheistic, while the EB (and archeological/anthropological evidence) lean towards the Cherokee belief system being animistic with a very vague "prime mover" creative force alluded to in a couple of stories but never venerated, like the rest of the Mound Builder descendants.
-No matter WHAT claims they make about specific territories, there's a potential for slapfights.
-Yeah, there's definitely going to be a minor controversy at least around one Native declaring another "isn't injun enough". Blood purity is a huge source of autism in every tribe that gives a fuck about it (which is most of them due to casino money hedging).
1. Horses aren't native to NA, the settlers brought them over (and then several of the Plains tribes took to them to the point where they basically became Scythian/Hun-esque horselord peoples).I love how their all "The natives will all get along and they'll develop technology!"
"What technology did they develop by the time the settlers had arrived?"
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"They stopped eating horse shit."
2. The Southern Woodlands indians did well enough for themselves that the UK established formal relations with them as equal partners (and continue to acknowledge Cherokee sovereignty- they invited a representative of the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation to the Diamond Jubilee) and were advanced enough to have slow sea trade with Mexico from modern-day Alabama.
They did (albeit to a limited degree), but they didn't have a reason to. Industrial civilizations develop in response to high pressure for the products of industrial civilization (preserved goods, quick-fab housing, and high-grade arms). Plains Indians didn't need any of that, because when they ran out of food or the weather turned bad, they'd just move somewhere else. Aeluts couldn't develop it because the resource-intensive nature of bare-bones survival near the Arctic Circle gives you no free time to fuck around with technology or warfare. The Mound Builder cultures, on the other hand, were more advanced- and not coincidentally lived in an area where space and food were at a higher premium (what would become the American South) and had wars with each other- but not somewhere so hellish that you have to devote most of your efforts to just staying alive.Would the natives actually have the resources/institutions to develop an industrial civilization?