Braving Native American Diversity
Native American diversity is a two-pronged topic. First, there is the whole concept of introducing Native American characters, then there is picking which tribe you’re dealing with. This began as a reply to an ask we received recently and has since expanded into a general guide.
Native American characters are wildly under-represented in media, as a whole. 0.5% of movie roles go to Native actors, there are 0 Native protagonists in the top 100, and less than 1% of children’s books feature Native people (source). As a result, it can be very intimidating to even consider writing them, because there is so little good representation. It can become tempting to change it, especially after an initial fling with the stereotypes.
There are a lot of stereotypes about Native Americans, and it can be extremely difficult to figure out what’s fact from fiction. Where is the line between Noble Savage and a spiritual character who puts stewardship of the earth as a priority? It can be very difficult to tell.
That being said, making a respectful Native character is not actually that difficult in the grand scheme of things. The steps are simple:
1- Pick a nation/tribe
2- Research that tribe’s customs to get a rough idea of how their upbringing would influence them
3- Flesh out how that character relates to their identity and the rest of the world
4- Basic character building stuff
5- Get somebody of the group to look it over for glaring issues
Ethnicities are not “flavours”. They’re not something you pick out of a grab bag of “Oh, I should have this.” Yes, they can start that way, but you can’t just toss away a huge part of a character’s background without due thought.
If you can throw the ethnicity out, then you were nowhere near to creating a good character in general. Changing characters happens, yes, but things like race impact so much of the character growing up (especially a marginalized identity) that simply tossing them out without a thought is, to me, a sign you really didn’t try for good representation. You just wanted a flavour, a little extra special something, and once you realized that was hard, you cut it.
If you changed it because you didn’t have a reason to be diverse, why? Do people need reasons to be diverse in real life? Can you really not imagine a world where a Native character would exist in a group of friends? From Nikhil:
You don’t really have to have to reason to make a character a specific ethnicity, but the usage of that ethnicity has to be appropriate. So it’s probably best to settle on a character’s ethnicity early on and use that as a starting point for proper research, instead of just using the ethnicity as decoration and then having to redo your worldbuilding and/or characterization halfway through because you realized you were falling prey to stereotypes.
Diversity is not optional. That’s really the bottom line. Spend a day people watching and you’ll notice that the world is extremely varied just on external appearances. This doesn’t count what you can’t tell from a single person standing still (such as mental disabilities, sexual orientation, trans status, invisible illnesses), or the ridiculously wide variety of life experiences.
Just picking and choosing an ethnicity like it’s the character’s favourite colour is wildly disrespectful. If you’re avoiding it because it’s too scary, too hard, too fill with minefields— know they won’t be disarmed until there is good representation to draw from. Would you rather be one of the reasons future writers struggle with this, or do you want to be part of the solution?
And you know what? The way you get better at writing marginalized identities is to write marginalized identities. I would not be where I am as a writer or a researcher today if I didn’t have ten years of experience writing non-Western fantasy under my belt. Yes, I will admit I started off with a certain amount of exotification, but it has been a better education unlearning that exotification than avoiding it. Now, I’m far more cautious about what I research, how I research it, and respecting the culture on its own terms instead of mine.
The hard truth is: you will only unlearn all this stuff and start asking better questions if you admit you know nothing at the start, everybody starts somewhere, and there are resources out there to help you. It will be difficult. It will be painful, cause you’ll probably come across dozens of call outs like this. You’ll probably get tired of reading them.
Natives are just as tired of writing these callouts. We’re tired of people taking our identities, thinking they’re doing a good job, and not knowing what they don’t know so much that we have to give them an education— again— because we are not represented and they genuinely do not know better.
Don’t shy away from learning. It’s how you grow.
