Hi, I'm a Native American, and I'm fed up with the appropriation of my culture by those desperate to be trendy, hip, ironic etc. Jack Skye’s brilliance:
“Cotton was used in both hemispheres prior to ‘contact’ between them, probably because it’s good for making textiles and different people at different times in entirely different places were intelligent enough to figure this out.
The point is that it’s not something exclusive to ‘white’ cultures. There are lots of other things First Nations peoples developed which are borrowed by Europeans, rubber, a wide variety of medicines, agricultural methods used in bio-intensive and sustainable agriculture, french fries. The point is that some things are shared and that’s o.k., others are sacred, and it’s disrespectful to glibly appropriate sacred things, particularly from cultures where those things have been forcibly suppressed or outlawed. It is also important to consider the history of how things get shared. I wear ‘western’ style clothing and speak English because my ancestors had the Ojibway beaten out of them, were forced to abandon traditional dress, and in the society I live in there are consequences that fall on individuals who dress too much outside of the mainstream. When white people imitate sacred dress they see in the media or in museums, they don’t consider that sacred objects ended up in museums because they were literally stolen from indigenous people who were legally prohibited from possessing them until relatively recently.”
