Cultural Appropriation Cracker.

ayiman:

apihtawikosisan:

vcw11:

I had no idea that a Native American wearing a Native American headdress was degrading…. do people not understand their own culture? We were forced to conform to the “white mans” ways after they had pillaged us… RISE ABOVE THE MAN, FIGHT THE POWER!! WEAR HEADDRESSES MY NATIVE BROTHERS AND SISTERS!!

What?

Do you not get that part of the continuing pressure to conform to settler norms is that we divest ourselves of the cultural meaning of our symbols, and see things the ‘settler way’?  As in, when settlers decided it was totally okay for everyone to wear headdresses, we’re expected to agree?

If you are not from a Plains nation, and if you are not a person who has earned a warbonnet, then it’s offensive for you to wear it, native or not.  THAT is remaining true to our cultures, not this idiotic cry to embrace the settler notion that ‘it’s just fashion’.

this is the kind of ignorant bullshit you get when you learn about your ‘Native heritage’ by going to pow wows.

oh yeah. you fight conform to the same settler bullshit that turns the remnants of millions of cultural practices into one monolith of warbonnets and face paint. i mean, really, this is sad.

apihtawikosisan:

ayiman:

[Oh Fuck No]: NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN BIRTHDAY PARTY

thesising:

NO. 

NO.

NO.

This is so fucking incredibly awful that I just can’t.

Bougie white ladies teaching their young children racism! How adorable. Did you see the “Asian-themed” party?

Seriously though, check out how fucking bad this is:

and that’s not all!  I won’t post any more pictures of it but…

• shitty chicken feather headdresses and headbands
• shapeless “buckskin” dresses with tassles
• a terrible approximation of a tipi 
• that “woo woo” shit white people love doing so much because they can’t ululate properly.
• the ‘hau’ hand signal
• a whole bunch of racist americana, and a lot of references to an “indian look” “indian symbols” and a whole shitload of “indian names”

So when I talk about redface being a racist projection of the colonial gaze, this is the product.

Like, the overall effect is a celebration of vintage-style racism.  This is identical to the nonsense our grandmothers and grandmothers dealt with.  Look how far we’ve come.

We talk about how dealing with liberal not-racist racism is worse than dealing directly with some shaved-head peckerwood, and it’s true, because these people think there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of this.  These people are happily teaching their children that this is totally cool, that it’s just a fun thing for their kids to do.

Well, our kids get to go to school where white kids will pull that “hau” shit.  Where white kids will go “woo woo” while they pat their mouths.  They’ll get asked if they live in tipis or wigwams and they’ll get picked on and hurt and abused.  Our kids get to be called chugs and wagon burners and redskins by the children of these people, because those children learned that shit at home.

This shit is just so incredibly awful, I wouldn’t know where to begin.  I think the comments here are spot on.  This woman is so beyond clueless, you really just have to ignore her completely.

Lord, the teepee cake with the plastic totem pole?   *gag*

PLEASE DON’T SCROLL PASSED THIS

ellydwerewolf:

theillustratednerdgirl:

imjustheretodance:

So yesterday I posted a video of a Lakota elder who talked about his experience being the victim of a hate crime. PLEASE SIGN THIS PETITION!

http://www.change.org/petitions/justice-for-hate-crime-against-lakota-sioux-elder-vernon-traversie?utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=share_petition&utm_term=friends_wall

and here’s the video again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxrYQ0mFFQs&sns=fb

Justice for Vernon Traversie.

always reblog.

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)