Imitative Tendencies… the wrong side of trending
by Jaimie Isaac
Johnny Depp’s role as Tonto in this summer’s (flop) blockbuster The Lone Ranger created a topical stir among social networking spaces on the ideas of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation of Indigenous cultures. Disagreements arose when people questioned the harm of such a representation, defending Depp’s role of Tonto as honouring and unthreatening, while others were offended and pointed to the causality of Indigenous stereotypes.
Misrepresentation of Indigenous culture started from the time of European arrival within the political, cultural, social and economic determinations of colonialism and imperialism. Misrepresentation has taken form in the appropriation and misuse of Indigenous ideology, iconography and the traditions practiced by various nationhoods. The roots of Indigenous misrepresentation are deeply systemic in our cultural narrative, evident within social, political, religious and economic domains. Racist Indigenous misrepresentations are actively pervasive within sports mascots, fashion, Hollywood movies, Halloween costumes and large companies and organizations, and historically within literature, scholarship, museums and the art world.
Lately there are all too many examples of cultural appropriation in the entertainment industry. Victoria Secret’s 2013 spring runway featured a model parading in a headdress, turquoise jewelry and barely-there underwear. Indeed, in recent years, the fashion industry has targeted Indigenous cultural aesthetics to haute couture catwalks, fashion spreads and malls. Retail establishments like Urban Outfitters peddled the “Navajo line” with items called Navajo Print Fabric Wrapped Flask, Peace Treaty Feather Necklace and the Navajo Hipster Panty. Celebrities like Outcast and Ke$ha have donned head dresses which have contributed to the Indigenous-inspired mania manifested in youth culture and hipsters who embody a justification to culturally cross-dress. Oblivious (non-Indigenous) people wearing head dresses and painted faces are fetishizing and objectifying, and they reduce Indigenous culture to novel stereotypes.
Another recent example is the pop band No Doubt’s video Looking Hot, which shows band members dressed up as Indians and cowboys. The video features Gwen Stefani, carrying an eaglestaff, wearing a headdress and tight white leather fringe pants. The beginning of the video shows her wrists bound with rope whilst being apprehended by two cowboys. Clichéd images litter the video: bareback horse riding, tipi dwellings, wolves and smoke signals. These are sequenced together with cowboys drinking and incarcerating Gwen’s “Indian” tomahawk-wielding cohort. Subsequently, the video was pulled and the band issued an apology.
These trends raise important questions about our society. What can be assumed from thesedisplays of racial mimicry and frivolity? How can society interpret these cultural signifiers?Items like head-dresses and eagle staffs are important to many Indigenous groups and are intended for sacred, respected and celebratory purposes like pow wows, ceremonies or special cultural events. What is the possible impact of such a music video, representing women in a sexualized objectified manner wearing Indigenous motifs, when sexual assault, addictions and incarceration are current realities in Indigenous communities generated by centuries of colonial oppression? Conversely, these very issues are the stories mainstream media love to focus on in sensationalizing the “Indian problem.” These misrepresentations are harmful and maintain the legacy of racism and cultural genocide.
In the realm of visual culture, consider the histology of European appropriation of Indigenous Peoples’ property. The world’s most celebrated museum and gallery collections are full of looted artifacts, objects and human remains appropriated from Indigenous peoples from across the globe. Modernist paradigms dominated museums and galleries, which privileged a Western lensand perceived superiority that contributed to hegemonic modes of representations of the “Other”and demeaning discourse around primitivism.
The history of ethnographic collections in museums and the social science of anthropology legitimized the right to collect, classify, organize and arrange cultural objects for purposes of enlightenment. Anthropology and ethnographic disciplines tended to enforce the “ethnographic gaze”; they collected, codified and represented the “exotic” and “primitive” from a scientificperspective rather than a faith or experience-based understanding. The ethnographic gaze entitled one culture to look at another with superiority. These methods contributed to representations of cultures in museums and textbooks as romantically static anachronistic stereotypes. Indigenous scholar Linda Smith suggests that the methodologies and productions of knowledge within these disciplines were about asserting colonial power and domination, “imperialism and colonialism are the specific formations through which the West came to ‘see,’ to ‘name’ and to ‘know’ Indigenous communities.”
Over a century ago, Edward Curtis, the self-entitled ethnographer, created The North American Indian with which he framed a racially unified image of the “untutored savage,” ignoring at every opportunity to present diversity or complexity within Indian cultures. Curtis constructed anostalgic tribute to the composite stereotype of “Indianness”—his manifestations are still dominating popular images of the “Indian” to this day. The recent examples in popular cultureconjure colonial ethno/anthro-salvage methods that have perpetuated constructs of a unified tribal pan Indianism stereotype that at once diminishes and trivializes cultural distinctions. As Lucy Lippard explains, “overemphasis on static or original identity and ‘notions’ of ‘authenticity’imposed from the outside can lead to stereotypes and false representations that freeze non-Western cultures…”
However, there are stories of people pushing back and responding to the cultural appropriation phenomena. Many contemporary artists have provided a critical examination of these social schemas and schisms in their work, and have responded to popular culture’s compulsion to caricaturize Indigenous iconography. Artists like Stephen Foster work to deconstruct notions of the “Other” and populist ethnographical images in his series, Re-Mediating Curtis. KC Adams’s work Cyborg Hybrid also challenges, subverts and defies stereotypes. The Ephemerals Collective, including myself, Niki Little and Jenny Western, address issues of cultural appropriation in our film Maiden Indian and continues to explore this topic in upcoming work. A music group, A Tribe Called Red, popularly known for the “Electric Pow Wow” beats ask their
fans on Twitter to stop wearing red faces and headdresses to their shows. The Tall Tree MusicFestival in Vancouver Island supported them by having a “no head dress” policy and confiscated them at the door. One of the DJ’s, Ian Campeau stated, “They wanted everyone there to feel safe, and feel wanted, and not ridiculed and cheapened. I really appreciated that.”
Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike must together deconstruct and destabilize mythological subjugation and decolonize our mindsets. Admiring a culture as novel or kitsch while ignoring their political, social and economic situations embodies a disrespectful colonialist ideology. However innocent the origin, or wrongful the excuse of “cultural appreciation,” people mustchallenge assumed and misinformed race-based beliefs and representations.
References:
Brown, Micheal F. 2004 Introduction: Who Owns Native Culture. Harvard University Press.
Lyman, R 1982 How the Indian Was Made. Pantheon Books in association with the Smithsonian
Institution, The University of Michigan.