Wow, Stanford alumni

[pastwatcher]

This is pretty damn shameful.

And right around Columbus Day, too. Because you know how the "discovery of the New World" was just awesome.

Note: I'm actually very "patriotic" about the USA. I think there's a lot of good or at least hopeful things about this country, and I would rather use my places within American culture to influence it than any other--even though I want a world where resources are shared well enough that we don't need nation-borders, or something like that. But, if we celebrate Columbus for his representation of European exploration of the New World, then we celebrate genocide, and we continue to ignore many of its survivors' descendants.

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

It's very difficult for me, as a fairly mainstream white person, to even contemplate cultural appropriation, because the closest things I can think about which I identify with in my own life, things from my own cultural background, are generally shared so widely or else treated in such a way as to be completely meaningless. What I mean is, it doesn't hurt me. Like, someone from Japan could copy Western Art and produce manga with bastardized versions of European history in them, but what would I care? It wouldn't affect me at all. Or as someone tried to make an analogy in the thread, what if the 'Fighting Irish' weren't at a Catholic school in the US, but at an English school? Well, even as someone with some amount of Irish heritage (I could be half Irish for all I know,) this wouldn't affect me in the least--so I wouldn't care. My Scottish ancestors are regularly exploited and misrepresented on the covers of romance novels, but I don't see how this possibly could hurt.

I suspect that's where a lot of people are coming from on this issue, including many Indians. If you don't even live in Atlanta and don't interact with any Braves fans, why would you care?

I was thinking this morning about 'What *is* appropriation?' No one cares if you appropriate their food. I can eat all of the fried okra I can get my pasty little hands on and no one will ever care. Religion becomes trickier, because some religions are explicitly evangelical, and so want to be appropriated, while others explicitly aren't. Just declaring that you're setting up a new form of Judaism would be considered kind of not-cool by the other Jews. But still, who has a right to dictate what other people are allowed to believe or not believe about god? How do we 'own' these things, and do they ever legitimately become part of another group's cultural heritage? If my mother read me Bre'er Rabbit stories, and I saved my Bre'er Rabbit books and now read them to my children, and someday they tell those stories to their kids, does that become part of our culture, as well?

I minored in anthropology because I love other cultures. I love learning about how other people think and see and experience the world. There are so many different ways of being. And yet, saying "I love X culture" or " I love Y about this culture" is a very tricky business. I hope we can all learn to be respectful enough that we can all celebrate each other's cultures without fear of harm someday.

I still remember, in what I think must have been a crucial moment of my childhood, spotting an Indian costume in a toy catalog when I was 8 years old. I wanted that costume for *months*. It became one of my dearest possessions. I loved Indians. I read books about Indians. I visited Indian reservations. I sought out dolls with darker skins so they could be Indian dolls. I lectured my friends about how the movies were wrong and it was the cowboys who were the bad guys and wrote Rabbit-Proof-Fence style stories about children escaping from boarding school.

It's odd to me that if it turned out that my unknown grandfather were actually an Indian, I would suddenly have some justification to claim ethnic allegiance to a culture which I formerly didn't. (I don't have the skin tone to pull an Iron Eyes Cody, after all.) But it's quite likely that I haven't a drop of Indian blood in me, despite all of my desires to the contrary. (I was also convinced as a kid that if I were Mexican, I'd have friends, and prayed for god to turn my hair black.)

That original costume was certainly appropriated. I doubt it was accurate, and certainly most Indians these days wear jeans and t-shirts like everyone else, not headbands and fringe (actually, Indians never wore headbands. Hollywood just stuck those on movie-Indians to keep their wigs on. Then the hippies picked up the style, and now tweens are wearing them to dress up like hippies.)

I understand the argument that you should not do things that are harmful to others. I understand why violent, ugly, harmful representations are bad.

--cut for length

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

But in my own personal experience, it was through an initial misrepresentation that I came to learn a great deal of *real* things about real people, came to respect and try to understand them, instead of just accepting the vague ideas which I had imbibed from our culture. It made me less able to ignore real live Indians, to not care about them or not listen to them.

I don't want to be disrespectful or harmful to anyone (except those I disagree with and see as threats to my comfort, safety, and happiness). And I don't in the least consider my experiences representative of anyone else's, or that Indian costumes and mascots and the like are going to suddenly change conditions for Indians everywhere. But it does make me wary of the theory as you've articulated it.

I think unfair treatment of Indians persists less because of the Atlanta Braves than because of institutionalized racist structures and folks generally not caring about issues they know nothing about. Most folks don't care about the negative effects of US drug policy on folks in Latin America, for example, not because they've seen stereotyped depictions of Colombians, but because they just don't know and don't care.

I find the case of the Florida State Seminoles rather interesting (I suppose it's good they decided to be the Seminoles and not the Crackers? But maybe less amusing?) in the way the college has worked with the Seminole tribe to create depictions which the tribe approves of. I wonder if students who attend FSU end up more aware of and sympathetic to Seminole causes and interests as a result, and if this could be a viable strategy for increasing visibility of real Indians and drawing attention to their accomplishments and struggles.

Anyway, I've babbled on for far too long. Good night and take care.

[pastwatcher]

Hey, lots of good points.

And I am definitely on board with the "maybe we will be able to celebrate each other's cultures respectfully" thing. I think it's kinda circular, though: particularly offensive cultural distortion tends to happen when there is already a high level of casual disrespect and/or ignorance of that culture in the mainstream. But, what the effects are, and where the lines are drawn, and what can actually help or not, is definitely something I don't understand well despite some amount of trying to.