"telynk"

This is an alternate history timeline where Donnacona, the chief of Stadacona (the town that Jacques Cartier "discovered" on the site of present day Québec City), goes back to France and converts to Christianity as per "our timeline," but doesn't die of smallpox and instead returns back to "Turtle Island" (Hanunah), their name for the New World as a whole) as a vassal of the French king with a lot of good ideas for reforming things to help his people survive. The end result is a present-day North America with a much greater indigenous influence, and several native and hybrid polities; and then of course the Old World is interestingly different as well, though I sort of see this as a sideline. I admire this work because it is culturally focused in a way that many alt-histories are not (the work on syncretic religions is really fascinating); because both in terms of cultural formations and of language, the author works hard to reflect (our best understanding of) "how things actually were" (and good lord I'm ignorant on this stuff--the matriarchal side of Iroquoian culture is all new to me and I am ignorant and it is time to get edumacated) and project outward to "how things might have been"; and in a broader sense because she (?) understands that the "butterflies" of history idea doesn't just mean "x now no longer leads to y and z but instead to a and b, and everything still proceeds programmatically, and every difference has a cause," but that history and reality are a lot more complex than that and when you make one thing different, you've made everyone and everything different, and changes don't need logical justification (no more than anything that happens does)--a new new world just kaleidescopically unfolds.… (more)