Yeah, No. More Catwalk Colonialism. I Am #NotYourSquaw.

#DSquaw.

I shit you not. That's what these idiot white boys are calling their new fall collection, sent down the latest Fashion Week Colonial Catwalk.

As though the theft of imagery and culture, the appropriation of names and identities and narratives, the flat-out redface faux-powwow shuck-and-jive weren't enough, these morons had to take it all to new gutteral [as opposed to guttural] depths. Dean and Dan Caten, the hipster designers who hipsterishly refer to themselves as DSquared2, thought it would own so hip [and edgy, too!] to steal from Native cultures and then call it . . . wait for it . . . #DSquaw! Isn't that just too, too precious?!

Yeah, no.

And even the Styleite article slamming this racist idiocy gets it wrong. That word, people, does not, in the white man's vernacular, in his lexicon of racism and misogyny, translate to "vagina." Oh, no, no.  It translates to something much more vulgar, much more insulting. It translates to a four-letter vulgarity beginning with "c," used to describe women's genitalia . . . but not just any women, oh, no. It refers specifically, in the most odiously racialized sense possible, strictly and solely to Native women, reducing us whole and entire to that single body part. That vulgar, unclean, subhuman body part, when it exists on us Native women. That body part that members of the U.S. Cavalry cut off the bodies of our ancestors and turned into sacrilegious "medicine bags" and other personal ornaments, scalping of another sort, trophies of rape, of massacre, of genocide. 

And, as happened two weeks ago with fellow white racist ripoff design house KTZ, there is allegedly another direct theft from a Native designer. Then, it was Apsàalooke/NorthernCheyenne designer b.YELLOWTAIL who saw her own design, from her great-grandmother's beadwork, an old traditional family design that she used with the proper permissions, stolen, warped, and twisted into a nasty little piece of cheap knock-off appropriation. This time, it's a beaded bag by Sandra Okuma, copied largely wholesale, with a few cosmetic alterations, and slung around the neck of a white model who presumably is supposed to be the designated #dsquaw stand-in.

Enough, already.

Our cultures are not your property. Neither are our histories, our identities, our imagery, our traditions, our labor, or our very selves. And the nastiest of sexualized racial slurs is certainly not yours to fling at us while stealing from us (or even while not).

Every person in the fashion industry who contributes to these instances of cultural theft (and more tangible forms of theft, too), who praises it, who countenances it without publicly calling it out, who supports it in any way, shape or form: You're the heirs apparent of a long tradition of racism, misogyny, cultural theft and erasure.

And there's another word for that toxic combination, you know.




All text copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

#NotYourRedskin: On MLK Day, the Fritz Pollard Alliance Takes Snyder to the Woodshed. In Public.

Image copyright Fritz Pollard Alliance; all rights reserved.

After another sleepless night, I got some early good news in the fight against redface on this observed day of commemoration of the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Wings himself brought this story to my attention, having gotten it as an online news alert.

The Fritz Pollard Alliance has (quite deliberately) chosen this day to take a very public stand and make a very public statement in opposition to the Washington Reds***s team name and mascot. 

For those of you unfamiliar with the Fritz Pollard Alliance Foundation, it's a civil rights group that works to promote diversity in the National Football League. Specifically, per the group's Web site:

We promote diversity and equality of job opportunity in the coaching, front office and scouting staffs of National Football League ("NFL") teams.

The group of former members of the NFL family and associated activists who would eventually coalesce into the Fritz Pollard Alliance are the ones who midwifed the "Rooney Rule," requiring interviewing and consideration of candidates of color for all head coaching hires. That rule went into effect at the end of October, 2002, and less than six months later, the FPA was born. In the more than a decade since, It has worked tirelessly to improve diversity in the coaching and managerial ranks of the NFL.

Today, FPA Chair John Wooten, Executive Director Harry Carson, and Co-Counsel Cyrus Mehri and N. Jeremi Duru have taken an extraordinary step on behalf of Native Americans, fans and otherwise, across Indian Country.

Leaders of the Fritz Pollard Alliance — an influential nonprofit group that was instrumental in forcing the league to revise its minority-hiring practices — said they tried to discuss the issue with Snyder at an intense August meeting. Instead, they said, they were shouted down by the executive director of the foundation he created to help Native Americans.

The alliance, which is headed by former players, also told The Washington Post that, at a pair of annual gatherings, they voiced concerns about the moniker to NFL leadership — including once to Commissioner Roger Goodell — but were told it was a matter only the team could address.

At a dead end, alliance leaders have taken their opposition public on Martin Luther King Jr. Day for maximum impact. The group has a history of spurring substantial change in the NFL, making the proclamation among the most significant victories for opponents of the name.

FPA Chair John Wooten was nothing if not blunt in his letter:

“As the NFL continues to move in the direction of respect and dignity, one of its teams carrying this name cuts glaringly against the grain,” read a letter co-signed by the group’s chairman, John Wooten, a Redskins lineman in the late 1960s. “It hurts the League and it hurts us all.”

The letter was also signed by Fritz Pollard Executive Director Harry Carson, a Hall of Fame linebacker for the New York Giants.

Of course, team spokeshill Tony Wyllie is seeking refuge in the organization's usual "play the victim" stance, pronouncing himself "dismayed" and feigning an inability to understand. FPA counsel N. Jeremi Duru, who is the author of Advancing the Ball: Race, Reformation, and the Quest for Equal Coaching Opportunity in the NFL, dispenses with that nonsense fast and thoroughly:

“There seemed to be an argument on the [team] side that it wasn’t reasonable to be offended by the use of the word,” Duru said. “My research found that it was quite reasonable to be offended by its use.”

Exactly.

Duru's co-counsel piled on more reality:

“You can’t move forward as a league talking about respect and dignity if you have one club going the opposite direction,” said Mehri, one of the alliance’s lawyers. “I made the point that this is bad for the league, and Jeremi made the point that Native Americans have a legitimate argument.”

FPA officials tried having a civil and reasoned discussion at the team training camp, in a meeting with a group that included Snyder himself, team president Bruce Allen, and OAF executive director and token "Original American" Gary Edwards. Snyder and his minions, of course, have reacted entirely predictably. Which is to say, thrown a tantrum the likes of which would shame the average two-year-old.

After Wooten told the team they had come as friends, Mehri said he started his pitch — then the meeting rapidly deteriorated. 

“Every time we tried to speak, this guy Gary Edwards exploded,” said Mehri, who has also worked an NFL consultant. 

“It was really hostile. And it was jarring, because it was so out of place.”

When Carson brought up the issue, Edwards fired back, asking what Carson, who is African American, would want to be called. 

“I want to be called a man,” Carson recalled saying. 

Edwards, a Cherokee and retired deputy assistant director of the Secret Service, was so disruptive that Fritz Pollard officials said they never had the chance to ask Snyder if he would meet with activists. 

“At some point, we just gave up talking,” Mehri said. “It was clear they were not in a frame of mind to even hear the words we were saying.”

This is simply more evidence that nothing Snyder and his people do is done in good faith. It's all about maintaining iron control over their right to be racist. Because they want to, and like a bunch of two-year-olds, they will not be denied.

Edwards is particularly troubling. He already has a reputation around Indian Country of behaving like a ringer and a plant, like the worst of the sell-outs from the bad old days of COINTELPRO, the kind of hired goon that would have been comfortable in the company of Dickie Wilson. His behavior since taking on this particular role as official Cavalry Indian scout for a white-owned billion-dollar corporate enterprise has been nothing short of shameful. Aside from the fact that he is engaging in destructive racism against his own for the benefit of the dominant culture, he is an embarrassment to this rest of us. Shouting people down, demanding to know what Black men "want to be called," insinuating that they secretly prefer racial slurs? This is not our way.

Mr. Wooten isn't having any.

“We have to take a stand. That name has to be changed. We can’t just leave it up to [the team]. We think it’s disrespectful. We think it’s, by definition, demeaning,” Wooten said. “I truly believe all sides, including the Native American groups who don’t feel the name needs to be changed, they all need to be there, and they should all sit and discuss this. That hasn’t happened. I truly believe that has to happen.”

It is disrespectful. It is, by definition, demeaning. It is destructive. It is racist. And it does need to be changed.

So many profound thanks are owed to the Fritz Pollard Alliance and its officials, for their courage and their willingness to stand with us as outspoken allies.

And to Snyder, Allen, Wyllie, and Edwards, on this day, when we activists of color and allies all over the country and the world celebrate the life of a man whose shoes you are not fit to shine, let this be fair warning:

The name will change. With or without you. Because we are #NotYourMascots, and we are sure as hell #NotYourRedskins.

  

Except as otherwise indicated, all content copyright Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.

Synthesizing Sacrilege: Slutwear, Scalps, and Sacred Objects. #NotYourRedskin.

Image Credit:  facebook.com/leilanidowdingofficial

Just when you think you've seen it all . . . .

Comes now yet another celeb, this time an Anglo-Filipina model from the U.K. who stars on a Miami-based U.S. "reality show," tarted up for Halloween in redface both metaphorical and literal.

Via ICTMN, we learn that she posted her selfie to her Facebook page, captioned:

"I just got massacred by a cowboy. Note Fur is FAKE!!!"

Good for you, dearie. So glad to see that you're so concerned about the possible hurt feelings of animal-rights activists — and presumably about the pelts of the animals themselves.

About the "pelts," the scalps and skins, of our ancestors — you know, actual people, actually massacred — notsomuch, apparently.

[Sigh . . . .]

The Pocahottie (or Pocahotass, take your pick; we use either, and not as a compliment) "costume" is bad enough. You know, Native women are not sex objects and sluts. We're really, fully three-dimensional, fully-actualized human beings. Your equal. We walk every conceivable road, every life path, career, vocation or avocation your imagination can summon. And this is what your brain comes up with?

I'm a little past the sex object age now, but I remember a time when white men thought I'd be flattered by their "squaw" fantasies. You've just played into that whole racist, misogynistic, genocidal slur, but with all the consequences borne by our women, not by yourself. [And if you don't know what that word means, go here and scroll down near the bottom; it's all there.]

But you just had to add the warbonnet, didn't you? A sacred object — and one identified, in actuality, by only a small fraction of our peoples, Hollywood's errors notwithstanding. Yeah, I know, it's a fake "warbonnet." It's still sacrilege to the people to whom that cultural imagery and object belong. It's also not something ever worn by a woman (although you should not make the mistake of thinking that the women of those tribal nations have no power entwined with it, because they most certainly do; power of a sort you clearly have no hope of understanding, much less attaining).

One would think that all of this would be more than enough offense for one Halloween.

One would be horribly, terribly, tragically wrong.

"Redface" is a term I've used probably my whole adult life to describe the practice of non-Indians dressing up in "costume," whether for Halloween, as actors in roles that should be filled by actual Indians, as so-called "fans" of racist mascots, or as out-and-out frauds of the sort that pretend to equally fraudulent "shamanism." It's minstrelsy. And it's racist. If you do it, you're engaging in racist behavior, and your "intent," however you pretend to articulate it, is utterly and completely irrelevant to the racist nature of your conduct.

And so you, Leilani Dowding, have engaged in Redface already, with your skimpy little buckskin fringes and your fake feathers and your sacrilegious headdress. But I guess you just felt compelled to take it to a literal level?

Because what explanation can there possibly be for you to have painted one side of your face, you know, actual red?  Worse, for that actual red to represent blood: the blood of scalping, of having one's hair and skin torn from bone like a pelt, for a bounty, and then drizzling the blood "artistically" down your slender throat to run in rivulets over and between your breasts.

I'm rarely speechless about this sort of racism, but I'm having trouble finding the words for this one.

Leilani Dowding, your "apology" in the comments section at ICTMN shows that you still don't get it.  So perhaps, from one mixed-blood woman to another (of another different ethnic background), I can break it down for you.

Because this? This is a horror show, but not the fun Halloween kind.