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 FairbanksFollow this link for a video and brief analysis of cultural representation as a practice of domination.
These images are harmful and do affect people. These images reduce an entire race into something subhuman. These images promotes racism; these images promotes the idea that we are nothing but a costume. Warbonnets are sacred; perhaps you do not understand the meaning of sacred.
The amount that an object is sacred lies within the minds of people, dear. Not within the object itself. If somebody wants to wear a costume as such, you are not the person to tell them not to do it. It isn’t racist to dress as another culture. It isn’t a form of discrimination due to a person’s race. It is nothing more than the interest towards the way an object looks.
It is racist to steal sacred items from a cultural that isn’t your own and it is racist to wear a costume to depict an entire race. Racist stereotypes are racist. And desecrating sacred items is offensive.