Cultural Appropriation Cracker.

The Native Object - Or Do Not Reduce Us to False Symbols of Your Environmental Movement

selchieproductions:

Hippiesque environmentalists love indigenous peoples; we’re naturally all a homogenous group of people who, despite the fact that we come from 72 different countries and we amount to more than 300 million people, all believe that the earth has a soul and then there’s the money that we cannot eat and, perhaps most important of all, Chief Seattle’s words; ‘the earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth’.

Inspiring words indeed, the only problem here is that they where never uttered by Chief Seattle in the first place, but they’re in fact the product by a Southern Baptist film director and script writer who in the 1970’s was in the process of making a film about pollution and what better than to invoke the noble, nature loving savage ?

So off he went, writing a speech that soon became accepted as the true words of a Native American chief who, in true colonial fashion referred to the president of the US as the Great White Chief and who lamented the death of the buffalo in his much quoted speech.

Only Chief Seattle never saw a buffalo in his entire life.

But what’s reality when you can have an indigenous, eco-friendly chief, ideally wearing a feather bonnet, talk about environmental issues. It doesn’t matter if he ever said the things people attribute to him as indigenous people aren’t real anyway, or, if real, then long gone.

Or so the Western discourse.

(via ayiman)