Cultural Appropriation: A Photographic Journey to Explain Why You Should Wash Off the Warpaint and Put Down the Headdress.

AND IT’S NOT JUST NATIVES THAT THINK YOU ARE BEING OFFENSIVE:

“Centuries of Native Americans—as well as indigenous peoples all over the world—have suffered under dominating entities that tried to extinguish them—both physically (i.e., genocide) and culturally (i.e., the banning of traditional practices, such as the criminalization of the Lakota sun dance for most of the 20th century, residential schools in Canada until the 1970s, and so forth).

So while it’s great that you can walk around feeling like hot shit in your feathered headband, there are many Native Americans still too ashamed or afraid to even discuss their ethnicits or cultures with their children. Many whose songs, languages, ceremonies and skills have been lost by force. Many who are so mired in poverty and depression and addiction and other forms of social strife that you might have more access to their traditional cultures than they do."

~ Mimi Thi Nguyen

SO KNOCK IT OFF ALREADY.

Signed, Ashley Fairbanks

Follow this link for a video and brief analysis of cultural representation as a practice of domination.