Companion Logic: The Outside World
The rest of us know that sickening
tension
when someone we meet reveals
“I am Native American!”
It’s worse, we know, when they
follow the phrase
with the often used adverb and an unduly excited exclamation:
“too!”
A signifier of unity
through some sort of strange and distant…
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.
In case you forgot
Bet they don’t tell you about that in your textbooks…
(via raw-r-evolution)
Last year. Getting a new regalia
bag & scarf by Diné designer Penny Singer (model: Lisa Two-Charge)
Indigenous Peoples have never been more ready. We’ve got civil intellectuals based in tradition + warriors at the ready invading all sects. RISING. PREPARING.
Historically speaking, we went from being Indians to pagans to savages to hostiles to militants to activists to Native Americans. Its five hundred years later and they still cant see us. We are still invisible.
(via indigenousambition)
Ask any Indian kid: you’re out just walking across the street of some little off- reservation town and this white cop suddenly comes up to you, grabs you by your long hair, pushes you up against a car, frisks you, gives you a couple good jabs in the ribs with his nightstick, then sends you of with a warning sneer: ‘Watch yourself, Tonto!’ He doesn’t do that to white kids, just Indians (…) when you grow up Indian, you don’t have to become a criminal, you already are a criminal. You never know innocence.