WANNABE INDIAN (The Mention of God Series)

Cultural appropriation is when a dominating or colonizing people take over the cultural and religious ceremonies and articles of a people experiencing domination or colonization. When Euro-Americans take Native American symbols and ceremonies and use them for our own purposes, we are participating in the process of colonization and the destruction of Native culture. First they came to take our land and water, then our fish and game. This is just another in a very long series of thefts from Indian people and, in some ways, this is the worst one yet.

Cultural appropriation is a theft from a people, and also a distortion, a lie spread about a people. It is an assault on the cultural integrity of Native people, and ultimately threatens even the survival of Native people. When We live in the history of this theft and domination, how do we get to a place of positive connection or cultural sharing? Unfortunately, sincerity is not enough. As I see it, there are three different traps we can fall into as we attempt to reckon with Native American people.

The first trap is denial. European settlers on this continent had a view of a divinely ordained progress: This view is currently maintained through the premise that Native Americans benefit by being assimilated into White culture. For people who are enjoying the privileges of White society, there can be a strong tendency toward this belief. But for Native people, the view is different. They can see the wounds and scars of oppression every day. They are often referred to as the dying race.

If Indians are seen as only part of the past, White people can justify moving on, living only in the now. We can justify taking or using artifacts from Native culture as a way of preserving them. When Native people break the silence about injustices, or even assert their existence, they cut through the cultural denial. And the response of the officials has often been increasingly destructive silencing.

Cultural denial has similarities to the process of denial in individuals. There is a belief that if the victim can be destroyed, the guilt can be destroyed. These traps can obscure situations of cultural exploitation and make them appear honorable. This trap is an identification with the Indians, most likely out of our own distress or oppression, our disenfranchised desire.

And here the romantic stereotypes take over. We desire that utopia, want to be those romanticized Indians. We desire release from the guilt of association with White culture. We can see an example of this trap in current movies about Indians. This trap explains the appeal of an Indian like Sun Bear who taught spirituality to White people, and started a non-Indian entity called the Bear Tribe. He was considered a sell-out by many traditional Native people. First of all, this redemption we find is really a cheap grace. The injustices keep happening.

What gets created is multicultural white middle class dominance in yet another form. Thirdly, these options perpetuate the fantasy image of the Indian, and distort the real picture. They prevent us from seeing the real lives of Native people. They obscure and drown out their voices and expression of self. Pam Colorado, Oneida activist, says,. In the end, non- Indians will have complete power to define what is and is not Indian, even for Indians.

When this happens, the last vestiges of real Indian society and Indian rights will disappear. Let me present another example to help distinguish cultural appropriation from appropriate cultural sharing. This example is from European history and may speak to White women interested in feminist criticism of male-dominated spiritualities.

Cultural appropriation is one of the ancient tools of domination and colonization. It has been going on throughout history, whenever one culture has attempted to conquer another. Battles are not fought only by the force of arms, but also by images and ideas.

Pr. Segundo Almeida

Any context of domination will include such cultural imperialism. According to some scholars, the Catholic church took the image of the great mother goddess, and incorporated it as the virgin Mary, Mother of God. It used her early sacred sites for building its shrines to Mary. The church absorbed many such pagan symbols, yet distorted and transformed their meaning and their impact on the lives of the people. The shift of context, control, and usage created important shifts of meaning and power.

The conquerors took what had been an image of empowerment and valuing of women and turned it into an image promoting female acquiescence to male pre-eminence. They were able then to redefine female goodness as obedience, humility, and renunciation of sexual energy.

To capture and transform the image of goddess in this way served to further solidify the subjugation of women and undermine ideas fostering resistance. How is this similar to the cultural appropriation of Native images and practices by the New Age movement? The elders of the community sent the individual forth with prayers, and received them back offering interpretation of their visions and guidance for living out their implications. Each existed in balance with the other. When this ritual is brought into a New Age context, its meaning and power are altered.

There is no accountability to a community, particularly any Native community.

The form and structure of the ritual itself have been changed. For example, the giving and receiving of the Native way are transformed into buying and selling, a sacrilege in Native contexts. The use of images of wild animals and plants by urban White vision-questers trivializes the wholeness of the intimate relationship of a community to a specific region of land, and the inhabitants therein who provide food, clothing, inspiration and survival. This has been a part of most religious traditions.

Their own perceptions and values are thus undermined. These words then cannot be relied on, they have been warped to fit another agenda. By this, the attempt to hold onto authentic Indian spiritualities has been rendered more difficult. What are some of the effects of this warped agenda on Native people?

The actual realities of Native communities are erased. Native communities have been under assault for years, and are facing issues of dislocation, continued theft of land, poverty, unemployment, addiction, suicide, and despair. In Native communities, the recovery of traditional practices such as the vision quest helps build identity and community pride, helps empower Native communities for life struggles against a racist mainstream.

If these ceremonies are diluted by misuse in White America, the communities are weakened in their struggles for survival. So to summarize, White people finding themselves interested in Native Americans first have to deal with the stereotype image Indian, a projection of White fears and hopes which is an undercurrent to any understanding we seek.

We have to reckon with an inheritance of White colonialism and a context of structural racism. In such a context sincere spiritual searchers face three traps which can short circuit ethical right relations between White people and Native people: But what can we do? I believe there is a response which offers an ethic we can stand on. It has two parts: The first part is to become an ally. I believe this can also function on a cultural level. To take responsibility includes acknowledging the problem as bigger than individual guilt or innocence. Rather, our responsibility is to work against racism, to be an ally to those who are oppressed.

Oren Lyons, a traditional chief of the Onondaga Nation says,.

Nossos ministérios

Indians and non-Indians must confront these problems together, and this means we must have honest dialogue, but this dialogue is impossible so long as non-Indians remain deluded about things as basic as Indian spirituality. Since there are so many distortions, information is important. We can educate ourselves and our children and friends about the issues and struggles facing Native peoples today. Help can be given beginning in forms as simple and concrete as money, or appealing to our congressional leaders to support Native religious freedom issues and land claims.

There are many community-rooted Indian writers, artists, scholars, and cultural workers we can support, for example, by buying their books instead of the New Age impostor books. Participate in our writings, feel our visual art, move with our music, hear in your heart our stories. Native people need allies. White people have a choice. We can pretend there is no problem. We can get stuck in grief or guilt about what has happened. Cultural sharing involves interaction with the whole of a person and community, reciprocal giving and receiving, sharing of struggle as well as joy, receiving what the community wants to give, not what we want to take.

Cultural sharing begins in respect, with patience not to make assumptions but to risk stepping outside of our own frame of reference. On a fundamental level, cultural sharing will not be possible until we end racism. In the meantime, only when we wholeheartedly join the struggle to end racism, and all oppression, can we begin to experience cultural sharing. The second part of what we can do is to do our own spiritual work.

When we use someone as a surrogate, we occupy them in a way which prevents them from bearing their own children. Native spiritualities have a purpose in the communities in which they originate. They are fundamental for the Native cultural struggle against genocide. They are not empty symbols into which we can put our struggles, use them, for example, for the empowerment of women, or an affirmation of male bonding. Since we have projected an image onto the Indian, one part of doing our own spiritual work is to bring back that image into ourselves.

What do we see there? Can it teach us what we are hungry for? What do we long for? We live a society which seems to give us a choice between secularism or a rigidly-defined male God. Part of what feeds cultural appropriation is a deep spiritual hunger in White people. This sense of starvation is very real, but we must realize: Native people are not keeping us from spirit.

White culture has broken and disrupted its own spiritual heritage. If we believe there is such a thing as spirit, we can recreate a path to it, we can hope that it will help us in that process. I believe our desire itself, our desire for spirit, is a powerful magic which can open the doorway for us. We are hungry for this connection. But, in reality, we all live here on this earth, our lives equally enmeshed with the fate of countless other beings around us.

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These beings can teach us if we are quiet with them. Connect directly with the source. We can pay attention as we walk in the woods, or on a city block. We need to trust that we can begin where we are, who we are, in our own lives. What are the animals and plants we rely on? How can we honor that gift? How can we give back?

When we fantasize Indian religion, we might imagine a community of greater belonging and interconnection. We need to explore the links of spirit to community, ask ourselves, Who is my community? How do we negotiate the world together? Where do we find our power? What breaks us apart? What gives us meaning? What is our relationship to the world around us? We also see in so-called Indian spirituality a link to ancestors, to tradition. We are hungry for this link to ancestors. Native people have encouraged us to explore the earth-centered traditions of our own ancestors.

Some might object that those traditions are too hard to find, too far away. For example, the celebration of Christmas contains countless elements from the ancient ceremonies of the Yule, the Winter Solstice: I think it is also important for White women to acknowledge the fears and risks involved in exploring a woman-valuing Euro-descent spirituality. European Christian history includes the destruction of the earth-centered religions and the women who held roles of wisdom and spiritual power. Perhaps millions of women accused of being witches were burned and tortured.

We carry in our collective European psyche the memory of this gynocide [sic]. When I face my spiritual ancestry as a European descent woman, I face this loss, this tremendous assault on female power and value, perpetrated upon us by my own people. There is a risk in this and tremendous power. We need to acknowledge our own oppression, so that we are able to fight our own political and spiritual battles. We need to find or create our own ceremonies for our struggles. This too can be a life-long journey.

To take our own spiritual path seriously is to honor our place in the universe and the importance of our lives. At this point, some might still ask the question, are there any times when it might be appropriate for non-Indians to take part in Native rituals and ceremonies? The answer is complex, since it involves cutting through the stereotypes and understanding certain dimensions of Native religions, differences which are often overlooked.

In contrast, many of us are more familiar with religions like Christianity or Islam, which have an evangelizing impulse which encourages the conversion of others to their way of belief. Indian religions are built upon systems of relationships. For example, when White people have joined in activities protesting the building of the hydro-dam on Innu land, they participated with Innu people in ceremonies and prayers which were part of the struggle. White people have also become a part of Indian community through marriage or friendship. This is not the same as White people adopting Indian spiritual practices; rather it reflects the power of the community to adopt, to make relationship with a person.

If there are two things I could impress upon your hearts, I hope you will take these with you: I hope that you might honor the desire in your hearts, the interest in things Indian, and use it to really learn about Native lives and struggles. Use it to cut through the stereotypes, find out the deeper realities, and then to use the power you have to act in solidarity with Native people.

I also hope that you might trust in our ability to do our own spiritual work, trust that we can find a way to do it with each other. I ask you to believe with me that the spirit is here in our midst. For those who have begun this journey, I would also like to offer some further questions and reflections which have emerged on this path of creating anti-racist woman-valuing earth-centered spiritualities. For this paper, I can merely give voice to some of the issues which are raised, in the hope of sparking further discussion. What does it mean for an earth-centered spirituality, that the particular land on which we live is stolen land?

What about the grief of the land for her original people? Are there ways to be welcomed here? This is the land of our birth, perhaps for many generations. I believe we do belong on the earth, she is the mother of us all. But how do we live here with honor? Is it the responsibility of all of us who love this land to restore her original people? It seems to me that the land in all her specificity — this stream, that mountain, that group of trees — not only has been stolen.

The very idea of ownership of land goes against the ethic of an earth-based spirituality. When we live in a culture which takes for granted the ownership of land, what is our power as individuals to alter that? In this country even having access to land can be a privilege of comparative wealth. Do we have any power to free land from ownership?

What does it mean that we live in a culture which is polluting and destroying the land? Concrete, buildings, chemicals, pesticides, monocrop agriculture and many other aspects of our culture upset the balance of nature. Our food comes from far away, and through an industrialized process that makes use of other animals and plants. There may be non-Indian persons who feel they have been visited by Native spirits. What if the power is really there?

One of the reasons the traditional elders withhold access is because of the dangers of certain powers if they are not in a proper balance. So if we really believe the powers exist, it seems that one step is to acknowledge the depth of it, not play games with it. What are the consequences and responsibilities we have if we have become implicated in these powers? What do you do if the spirits have claimed you? What about those who have participated in some way in Native rituals? What are the implications of that? One of the principles of many Native traditions is the belief that knowledge equals responsibility.

So some of the dangers of these rituals are the ways in which we are implicated by them. How have we taken on commitments and responsibilities which we might not even be aware of? I think of the old movies where the explorer takes a bowl of soup from the pretty Native maiden and discovers in the ensuing hours that he has married her without knowing it. What have we committed ourselves to unawares, and what should we do about it now? Also, what about those who have participated in distorted or muddled ceremonies?

Are there purifications that should be done? What do we do in the context of multicultural settings of women, when we seek to create ritual among us? There has been a mingling of peoples and cultures, with beneficent as well as oppressive links. What ceremonies can hold us all, honor us all, respect the pain between us?

I believe that finding and sharing our own ancestral resources might be one step, but then what? If White women turn to our own ancestral traditions only, how are we being different from racist segregationists? How do we recognize our interrelatedness with all peoples, as well as the brokenness between us? Is it possible to create a way to pray together to bring us power for the struggles we face together? If Native women want to keep ceremony only in a Native context, given the appropriation which is rampant, is there a way for White, Black, Asian, and Latina women to honor the situation?

What about those of us who are of partial Native ancestry, but were raised in White culture with White privilege? What is our heritage and our responsibility? How is this different or the same for Black people of partial Native ancestry? Is there a legitimate calling from the ancestors which draws us into connection with Native spirituality? Does biological heritage make a difference here, or is our adoption into White or Black culture the primary kinship in which we must make community? And for those of any descent, how does ancestry influence spirituality? How does it shape our spiritual and ethical responsibilities?

What about those women who were adopted or in some way cut off from their biological roots? What is the interplay between biology and community and spirituality? What about for those who have been abused by their kin? How do gay and lesbian people reconstitute family and kin in the face of rejection for sexual orientation? Are there certain responsibilities for those who go between various cultures and classes of people?

Despite the complexity of these issues which are raised, I believe the journey we embark on is not so difficult or unwieldy. It is rooted in a commitment to the life of the people, and a trust that we are not alone. In closing, I would like to remember the advice offered by the Menominee two-spirit poet, Chrystos:.

I 1, Spring , p. Common Courage Press, p. Originally published in Z Magazine, Dec. Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance , Boston: South End Press, , p. Her tribal affiliation was mentioned in Indigenous Woman magazine. Penguin Books, , pp. For those who would like to learn more about the experience of Indian people and support Native women writers, I would recommend the books of the following Native writers, as a start: Jewish White women are an exception here since Judaism, like Indian religions, is a community based religion.

I dedicate this paper to my German-American paternal grandmother, born Mary Lucille Heisler, who died March 9, , at the age of A Basic Call to Consciousness: Plastic Shamans — native site about Plastic Shamanism. Intercontinental Cry — Reporting on Indigenous Struggles.

Wiinimikiikaa — Revolutionary Indigenous Resistance defunct. This list was selected by the publisher, not Myke Johnson. I think this exactly illustrates why a true earth-based spirituality cannot be separated from the struggle against the colonizer culture modern civilization. Infected with the wetiko sickness, it is fundamentally based on domination and exploitation — expressed in ownership of the land, and the oppression of everyone not at the top of the hierarchy.

This was a well written article and raised some very interesting points. There is a new age way of considering many problems and while there is a lot of truth to what you say-White people taking workshops to become Indian an appropriation of an aspect of culture is the least of the problems First Nations people face.

Many aboriginal people are inclusionists wanting to reclaim their traditions not only for themselves but for the earth. White people are here to stay any way you look at it. These traditions are native. Ps-you have appropriated an Aboriginal identity which you do not have. Metis especially capital M Metis is a distinct group of Aboriginal people in Canada North America with their own culture and traditions. For the version of this article please go to http: There are some moments of excellence in this piece, where Myke concisely and effectively sums up the issues of cultural appropriation and the unconscious racism of the appropriators.

But readers may also want to note that it is not recent. I believe it was originally published in , and there are some things about it that are dated. For instance, Myke recommends the work of Paula Gunn Allen who, in her books, supports frauds like Lynn Andrews and other appropriators. Ward Churchill is also referenced positively; I would suggest people look into the history of his treatment of women and why he has been denounced by AIM for falsely claiming to be Indigenous, for getting professorial positions based on this falsification, and taking Native American Studies jobs that should have gone to Native people.

Santa Claus really only has relevance to Scandinavians, and there was never a universal Goddess Culture. LIke with the many Native cultures, there were individual, pre-Christian religions with only some similarities. Only some of them were matrilineal, and probably not the majority. Corrections aside, this piece is still worth reading and sharing. Thanks to Myke for writing it, and for unsettlingamerica for reprinting it. It always does my heart good to see my article still making the rounds on the internet.

I agree that if you have native heritage, you have native heritage. No one can take that away from you. There is a lot of internalized racism among local and global native communities.

• Arpeggio Study (Left Hand).
• Wanting To Be Indian.
• Clean Slate (Kit Tolliver #4) (The Kit Tolliver Stories).
• PIB Mogi – Uma igreja de tradição e ação.
• Wanting To Be Indian | Unsettling America;
• I Never Worked In Pocatello — The Life and Times of Santa Fe Railroad’s Paul T. Collins.

The downside is that we are never fully accepted on one side or the other. I take exception to a discourse that stereotypes American Indian people and First Nations people as done in this writing, when discussing religious practices, cultural beliefs, treatment of women, world view and relationships with non-Indians. Presently there are federally recognized Indian tribes and at least a historical tribes not recognized by non-Indian governments. I am of European descent and worked as an employee of tribal government.

Thanks to several wonderful mentors I learned much about the ways of the tribe for whom I was employed. I honor the people of the tribe I worked with and as a sociologist I was interested in community, tradition, love of ancestors. There is some truth in this article but I find it insufficient in recognizing the great differences in tribes from their rituals, ceremonies, clan systems and the degree to which the tribal citizens and government is cross pollinated with the predominate society. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Twitter account.

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. The Native people he described were sane people with a healthy state of mind. Sanity or healthy normality among humans and other living creatures involves a respect for other forms of life and other individuals.

A starter pack essentially contains everything that is most recognizable with that archetype. For instance, the 'beard' is an essential component of the 'Delhi boy starter pack', because 'you're only a Delhiite if you have beard-swag' while a Salman Khan starter pack would be incomplete without a 'Being Human' shirt. Every something Indian guy looks like Virat Kohli today and it doesn't take much to ape him.

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Get yourself one of those cool looking undercuts with Wolverine claws, a pair of tapered jeans coupled with casual white sneakers and you're sorted! Every guy hailing from the Sallu brigade swears by the characteristic turquoise-stoned bracelet, the Being Human T-shirt and not to forget, big dole sholey. All he needs in his wardrobe is a pair of tight AF jeans, wayfarers to look dapper and a beard.

He is the typical 'Hauz Khas' dude. Okay, I got to admit it, atheism is turning into a 'neo-nonconformist' movement, with most people being driven to the brigade just because it's 'cooler'. The "only Engliss mujik please" kinda people swear by Rihanna, Maroon 5 and other artists who rely more on auto-tune than their own efforts. Every one who happens to visit a Comic Con on a free pass, kyunki "bhai jugaad karwayega" , collects Marvel and binges on Naruto automatically becomes a "nerd". Doesn't it bother you when a fellow desi who barely reads, comes up to you and confers the 'best author' title on Chetan Bhagat?

A gym is akin to paradise for a narcissist.

Spice Girls' Wannabe video gets remake for female equality push

The new working out fad has little to do with actual exercise and more to do with "protein ke dabbe". Every dude who lifts always sports 'sporty earphones', ever noticed? Honestly, the most annoying poseurs are those who claim to 'invoke Shiva' after a few measly puffs.

The same lot also worships Bob Marley because