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Perspectives of cultural appropriation
Perspectives of cultural appropriation
Perspectives of cultural appropriation
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By analyzing Sherman Alexie’s poem, “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel”, through the lens of Bell Hook’s essay, “Eating the Other”, we can see how commodity culture in the United States uses gender and sexual desire to exploit race and ethnicity. Specifically within the poem, we see Sherman Alexie use irony and stereotypes in a way that puts on display all the racist issues that we find in films and novels as well as the way in which our culture exploits those people and their culture for its own gain. We see from the very first stanza that stereotypes are put in place. It reads, “All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food”. Alexie …show more content…
They should destroy the lives of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love Indian men. That is always the case. White women feign disgust at the savage in blue jeans and T-shirt, but secretly lust after him.” This confronts the hypocrisy that we face today in our culture. The media does a good job at creating this allure about the “bad guys” that ends up being a double-edged sword. There is so much drama wrapped up within the “tragic” lives of the other that stirs desire (mostly sexual) into our culture. Bell Hooks puts it, “It is within the commercial realm of advertising that the drama of Otherness finds expression. Encounters with Otherness are clearly marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. The lure is the combination of pleasure and danger. …show more content…
Alexie writes, “In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts.” This emphasizes how our culture has co-opted the Indian culture (“white people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves”). The “inner Indian” must either be a healer or a warrior but only when it’s within a white person. This correlates with the point Hook makes in her essay about the role of the movie Hairspray. She writes, “When Traci says she wants to be black, blackness becomes a metaphor for freedom, an end to boundaries. Blackness is vital not because it represents the “primitive” but because it invited engagement in a revolutionary ethos that dares to challenge and disrupt the status quo. (37)” When we as a culture take on and appropriate the others we do it for selfish reasons, to heighten ourselves and our own emotions of excitement or whatever it is we are looking for. This happens until finally “white people will be Indians and all the Indians will be
The film, “In the White Man’s Image” and Sally Jenkins’ narrative, “The Real All Americans” both discussed the controversial issues and historical significance of nineteenth century social policies dealing with cultural integration of Native Americans, yet while “In the White Man’s Image” covered the broad consequences of such policies, it was Jenkins’ narrow focus on the daily lives of students involved that was able to fully convey the complexities of this devastating social policy. Jenkins’ recreated the experiences of students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, bringing the reader along with her as students were stripped of culture, language, and family to be remade into a crude imitation of white society. “...Now, after having had my hair cut, a new thought came into my head. I felt I was no more Indian…” (Jenkins, pg 75). Richard Henry Pratt, the creator of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School that became the inspiration and model for many similar institutions across the nation, intended to save a people from complete destruction, yet the unforeseen consequences of his ...
The depiction of Native Americans to the current day youth in the United States is a colorful fantasy used to cover up an unwarranted past. Native people are dressed from head to toe in feathers and paint while dancing around fires. They attempt to make good relations with European settlers but were then taken advantage of their “hippie” ways. However, this dramatized view is particularly portrayed through media and mainstream culture. It is also the one perspective every person remembers because they grew up being taught these views. Yet, Colin Calloway the author of First Peoples: A Documentary Survey of American Indian History, wishes to bring forth contradicting ideas. He doesn’t wish to disprove history; he only wishes to rewrite it.
Sherman Alexie grew up in Wellpinit, Washington as a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene tribal member (Sherman Alexie). He began his personal battle with substance abuse in 1985 during his freshman year at Jesuit Gonzaga University. The success of his first published work in 1990 incentivized Alexie to overcome his alcohol abuse. “In his short-story and poetry collections, Alexie illuminates the despair, poverty, and alcoholism that often shape the lives of Native Americans living on reservations” (Sherman Alexie). When developing his characters, Alexie often gives them characteristics of substance abuse, poverty and criminal behaviors in an effort to evoke sadness with his readers. Alexie utilizes other art forms, such as film, music, cartoons, and the print media, to bombard mainstream distortion of Indian culture and to redefine Indianness. “Both the term Indian and the stereotypical image are created through histories of misrepresentation—one is a simulated word without a tribal real and the other an i...
When an individual belongs to two different disadvantaged classes, the risk of abuse and discrimination multiplies. Thus, Native American women are at a very high risk of violence and sexual abuse. As of 2007, “One in three Native American women will be raped at some point in their lives, a rate that is more than double that for non-Indian women, according to a new report by Amnesty International” (Fears and Lydersen 1). This is exemplified in the novel in the rape, murder and mutilation of Evelyn Rose McCrae and Madeline Jeanette Lavoix. There was the possibility of a third assault and it occurs in front of the two brothers on New Year’s Eve. A car full of white men, one of which Jeremiah believes to be in his history class, pulls up in front of a young pregnant woman whom the young men jeer and proposition. All three women were Native American and in seedy neighbourhoods at the time that they were offered a ‘good time’, and the two were assaulted and murdered. The two assaults and murders were perpetrated by young men, and to be assumed as young white men. Through these encounters we can see how Native women were treated in the city as a twofold minority. In the setting of the city, Native American women are treated as lowly sex objects by the young men in all three instances. They had a lower social status as being both women and Native...
Culture has the power and ability to give someone spiritual and emotional distinction which shapes one's identity. Without culture, society would be less and less diverse. Culture is what gives this earth warmth and color that expands across miles and miles. The author of “The School Days of an Indian Girl”, Zitkala Sa, incorporates the ideals of Native American culture into her writing. Similarly, Sherman Alexie sheds light onto the hardships he struggled through growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in his book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in a chapter titled “Indian Education”.
The systematic racism and discrimination in America has long lasting effects that began back when Europeans first stepped foot on American soil is still visible today but only not written into the law. This racism has lead to very specific consequences on the Native people in today’s modern world, and while the racism is maybe not as obvious it is still very present. These modern Native peoples fight against the feeling of community as a Native person, and feeling entirely alone and not a part of it. The poem “The Reservation” by Susan Cloud and “The Real Indian Leans Against” by Chrystos examine the different effects and different settings of how their cultures survived but also how so much was lost for them within their own identity.
Deloria, in the introduction, begins with the picture of an American Indian using a modern bubble-style hair dryer at a hair salon. This image often evokes a chuckle, as Deloria states, because of our inherent expectation for an Indian to be wearing buckskin in the plains, rather than in a hair salon. Often, once the topic of stereotype, malice, and expectations are brought up, the chuckle or grin is gone. The preconceived ideal of what an American Indian should be is so deeply ingrained within us that we do not even give it a second thought when judging a supposed anomaly as the woman under the hair dryer. Deloria organizes his work into five sections, in the form of essays. These tackle the issues surrounding the stereotypes and expectations that we have for the Native peoples, in a variety of different aspects. The first one focuses on the idea of violence, and the popular notion of a savage depiction of the Indians. The second focuses on the Native American view of themsel...
Sherman Alexie has made a name for himself as a prolific contemporary Native American writer, taking inspiration from his own past and experiences with modern Indian life. While there are many enduring themes throughout Alexie's writings: Native identity, modern reservation life, alcohol abuse etc. when it comes to his collection War Dances, the most apparent motif is fatherhood. Community and family are the heart of Native American cultures, with the father archetype holding great honor and expectation. However with alcohol abuse, poverty, and school drop rates running rampant through Native American reservations it is no surprise that more and more Native children are growing up in broken homes. In an alarming poll by the Kids Count Data Center, a national census, in 2011 out of 355,000 polled 53% live in single-parent homes. The lack of a leader, a strong male role model is a major factor in many of the abysmal statistics facing modern reservation children. The despotism of Native American culture has always been based on the deprivation of power, status, equality, and home. This presents a paucity of male dominance, many of these men feel helpless in a society where they have no real identity. They are forced to live in the idea they have no personal potential so it is understandable why the majority of Indian males may feel inadequate and unable to care for their families. Alexie himself struggled in a home with an alcoholic and neglectful father, and like many Native children he almost gave into a similar chain of abuse and alcoholism. This is what inspires him to write, to expose the corroding inner workings of the modern Native peoples brought on by centuries of autocracy. Oppression and the idea of fatherhood is a common ...
The stereotype of Native Americans has been concocted by long history. As any stereotype constructed by physical appearance, the early Europeans settlers were no different and utilized this method. Strangers to the New World, they realized the land was not uninhabited. The Native Americans were a strange people that didn't dress like them, didn't speak like them, and didn't believe like them. So they scribed what they observed. They observed a primitive people with an unorthodox religion and way of life. These observations made the transatlantic waves. Not knowingly, the early settlers had transmitted the earliest cases of stereotyped Native Americans to the masses. This perpetuated t...
This is because photographers and writers make Indians resemble the Indian stereotype. A photographer in the 1900’s Edward Sheriff Curtis would take a box of paraphernalia to his photo shoots, like wigs, clothes, and backdrops in case he ran into an Indian who did not look the part Curtis would pay these Indians to change their hair or their outfit until they looked like an “Indian”(King, 34). I do not understand why Curtis would continue taking pictures of Indians in these stereotypical outfits, when he knew that they did not look that way; however Curtis was not the only one who created this stereotype. Karl May a writer, wrote a book on Indians, creating all these stereotypes, when in real life May had never even met an Indian. This seems strange that May would write a book validating this stereotype, when he himself had not even met an Indian in person. These stereotypes that were created by people like Curtis and May are unacceptable and as a student, I can help people understand the
... a variety of readers, Drew Hayden Taylor uses a variety of tones. His views on First Nations stereotypes are expressed through his essays “What’s an Indian worth These Days” and “Why did the Indian block the Road”, and through his use of humorous, which shows how ridiculous stereotypes are, informative, which gives disproves stereotypes through evidence, and sarcastic tone, which stretches a reader’s understanding about a topic, he is able to challenge and contradict stereotypes about First Nations people.
Cowboys and Indians is the popular game played by many children played as a game of heroes and villains. Natives are villainized in American pop culture due to the history being told by educational institutions across the nation. There are not many positive roles popular in the media about Native Americans. Many roles are even played by white people. The costume representation is not accurate either. The disrespect towards them is especially seem on Halloween, when people dress as Natives in cute and sexy ways that they think represent their culture. War paint, beads, feathers and headdresses are ceremonial accessories that represent their culture, it not a fun costume to wear. Only if they are being criticized and ridiculed, like they have been in the past. Racism has also been a huge problem when it comes to using creative names for sports teams, like the Redskins for example. Redskin is a derogatory and offensive term towards Native Americans and many white people do not see it as wrong due to the privilege they inherited throughout history. The disrespect towards them has grown and today it seems that if Natives were not getting ridiculed, they are for the most part ignored. The concerns that King describes in his book explains how the past has wired Americans to believing everything they have once learned. White people
According to Deloria, there are many misconceptions pertaining to the Indians. He amusingly tells of the common White practice of ...
Louise Erdrich’s short story “American horse” is a literary piece written by an author whose works emphasize the American experience for a multitude of different people from a plethora of various ethnic backgrounds. While Erdrich utilizes a full arsenal of literary elements to better convey this particular story to the reader, perhaps the two most prominent are theme and point of view. At first glance this story seems to portray the struggle of a mother who has her son ripped from her arms by government authorities; however, if the reader simply steps back to analyze the larger picture, the theme becomes clear. It is important to understand the backgrounds of both the protagonist and antagonists when analyzing theme of this short story. Albetrine, who is the short story’s protagonist, is a Native American woman who characterizes her son Buddy as “the best thing that has ever happened to me”. The antagonist, are westerners who work on behalf of the United States Government. Given this dynamic, the stage is set for a clash between the two forces. The struggle between these two can be viewed as a microcosm for what has occurred throughout history between Native Americans and Caucasians. With all this in mind, the reader can see that the theme of this piece is the battle of Native Americans to maintain their culture and way of life as their homeland is invaded by Caucasians. In addition to the theme, Erdrich’s usage of the third person limited point of view helps the reader understand the short story from several different perspectives while allowing the story to maintain the ambiguity and mysteriousness that was felt by many Natives Americans as they endured similar struggles. These two literary elements help set an underlying atmos...
By utilizing an unbiased stance in his novel, Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe promotes cultural relativity without forcibly steering his audience to a particular mindset. He presents the flaws of the Ibo tribe the same way he presents the assets—without either condescension or pride; he presents the cruelties of the colonizers the same way he presents their open mindedness—without either resentment or sympathy. Because of this balance, readers are able to view the characters as multifaceted human beings instead of simply heroes and victims. Achebe writes with such subtle impartiality that American audiences do not feel guilty for the cruel actions of the colonizers or disgusted by the shocking traditions of the tribesmen. The readers stop differentiating the characters as either “tribesmen” or “colonizers”.