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.

Please stop defending the indefensible.

Photo copyright Wings, 2014; all rights reserved.

Not all tricksters are simply coyotes. Some are just bad people.

Yes, this is going to be oblique. No, I'm not going to elaborate further. All the clues are there, and have been for days now, and I've already done everyone's due diligence for them and brought it up on FB. You want specifics, you'll have to do a little due diligence of your own (which, I might add, everyone already should have done before countenancing theft of intellectual property — in one case, from an actual Indian — vicious personal attacks and ugly bigotry).

Being an ally to people of color does not mean excusing truly indefensible behavior. In fact, there comes a point when doing so crosses the line into paternalism, to the point of infantilizing the person in question.

It's even more reprehensible when it's done to support a person who in all likelihood is not a person of color at all.  Especially when five minutes' worth of simple, basic research would have turned up exactly what I'm talking about. When a person cites a pretty-thoroughly-debunked fraud, and then further buttresses his own bad behavior by announcing that he grew up with that fraud in one location despite the debunking pretty convincingly showing that said fraud grew up elsewhere (hint: nowhere near the rez in question, and with not only no ties to it but no blood), and when the person allegedly posting from said rez elsewhere says that he's living in another state entirely, well, I'm not convinced that any of you should be defending this crap. And I wrote about this two days ago, and yet I learn that people are still defending this. Enough already.

Why am I always the one who has to point this shit out?

Yes, this puts me in a seriously bad mood.

InAppropriate

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.