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| I believe the photo credit belongs to Elizabeth LaPensée; it appears at Indian Country Today Media Network. |
Last October, in one my final editions of my Monday round-up of Native news (before connectivity and site-loading issues made further editions impossible), I wrote about Indian imagery and identity, and the importance of maintaining our sovereignty over both:
As I was putting together the stories for today's edition, I noticed two distinct and interrelated patterns emerging: themes of imagery and identity, intertwining, diverging, separating and merging again at different points along the continuum of what it means to be Indian in 2013.
There are many other stories out there right now, true, and they are important. But so are these — and despite the fact that the corporate media would regard these topics as "not hard news," that's incorrect. Today's stories encompass the existential conundrum of being Indian today, the requirement that we walk in two worlds at every moment of our lives when one of those worlds has done its damnedest to exterminate the other, and failing that, still actively works to neutralize its existence. And they do so in an equally dualistic way: in the public perception of who and what we are and what sovereignty and autonomy we have over that identity; and in the most private, intimate of spaces, in our own image of ourselves, both as individuals and as part of the collective culture labeled "Indian.
To that end, I'm leading with what other coverage would relegate to the "C" Section of the newspaper. It's a story about asserting and affirming ownership of our identities and images, and doing so in a way that forces the dominant culture to face us in all our beautiful, complex diversity.That story was about Drunktown's Finest, a film by a Diné woman that, among other things, explored the disconnect between what the dominant culture sees in her beautiful town of Gallup, New Mexico, and what she and her fellow Navajo Nation members see, love, and live on a daily basis. [Thanks to a Kickstarter campaign, she got the film wrapped in time for Sundance, and it's now premiering in Europe, too. And, yes, we kicked in a little to the film project.]
Lately, i've seen a spate of news items about racist appropriation —of our images, our languages, our cultures, our very identities. It's another form of colonizing, and it carries with it all the carpetbagging exploitation and appropriation — in other words, abuse and theft — that are part and parcel, an inherent element of, colonialism.
Exhibit A, of course, is Dan Snyder and his persistent, obstinate, in-your-face racism. no, Dan, we are #NotYourRedskins, and never will be. Then there are Warner Brothers and Joe Wright, and no, we're #NotYourTigerLily, either. Nor is white actor Rooney Mara. Of course, the movie itself is guaranteed to be a horror show; the Indian plot line in Peter Pan is irredeemably racist. And then there's last year's dead-crow abomination. No, Bruckheimer and Depp, we are also #NotYourTonto. [And, no, I don't want to hear about how these are innocent children's tales. There's nothing innocent about racism. And it's a very immature worldview that insists that your dominant-culture childhood mythologies must trump our lives. Your myth is a tool of my oppression, and I will not be complicit.]
But lately, there's more. A lot more. Over the jump, a look at some of the insidious ways this practice has taken root.
