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I’m always going to be a stalwart defender of both high art and complete trash. I also personally think that the best way to really open yourself up to the highs of the former is to be open to the guiltless pleasures of the latter.
friendly reminder that characters don’t need to be saints to be entertaining. and telling a story does not mean endorsement. art does not need to be all about morally good people.
IDK if this was meant as hyperbole but it’s literally true:
We are genuinely in a crisis of media literacy, with ever fewer genuinely factual resources available in the style and language used by contemporary audiences.
It may sound condescending, but we genuinely need to remind people, or worse, explain to them for the first time that art is not evidence of real world behaviour.
So, thank you, for this reminder. Genuinely.
You’re correct:
Art does not need to feature exclusively morally pure characters. Art is not proof of the creator’s secret, violent desires.
“Oh my god! This is like in the 1500s with the Indigenous people and smallpox,” she says. “They had no defences against it!”
Wait – what did she just say?
I pause and look to my friend. Did the Barbie film just compare women and patriarchy to Indigenous people and disease? Was that really necessary?
Other people obviously felt as taken off guard by the comment as I did, judging by the response on social media: “this line was unnecessary and not needed for the plot,” one person wrote. Another remarked that it “reeked of white feminism,” while another called it “a sloppy attempt at intersectionality.”
The thoughtless line about Indigenous people and smallpox ironically comes right before an insightful and impassioned monologue by Ferrera’s character on how complicated it is to be a modern-day woman.
—
I would have loved to have grown up speaking nêhinawêwin (Swampy Cree). My father understands it, and my grandparents spoke it fluently. My grandfather even had a radio station in Manitoba where he exclusively spoke nêhinawêwin. This loss began with the same history that dates back to Pocahontas’s “story” — dispossession, expulsion from our lands, forced assimilation, and discriminatory laws that disbanded many from speaking it for a time. Because of this, I didn’t get that opportunity. In the same way so many others didn’t.
Speaking of my grandfather, Murray McKenzie, he was a photojournalist. He received his first camera while recovering from tuberculosis at the Clearwater Lake Sanatorium. We know now that my grandfather was given a blanket carrying the disease. Murray was one of the few little boys who survived his ward at the sanatorium.
So imagine my surprise when a movie about another fantasized character, Barbie, goes on to include a reference to a disease that wiped out so many Indigenous peoples on the continent. For example, my colleague recently wrote a piece on the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Nation’s 100-year amalgamation anniversary, where it was shared that 100 years ago, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (the Squamish people) at one point went from a population of 30,000 to 400 because of disease.
—
I’ll end by saying this:
It is literally impossible to be an Indigenous woman.
We have to be beautiful but not too beautiful, or we might go missing.
We have to leave our homelands to become ‘educated,’ and to enter the ‘workforce.’
But we can’t forget who we are and where we come from.
We want to be good and loving mothers and protect our children,
But we can’t make a single mistake, or our children will be taken into the child welfare system.
We want to preserve the natural world for the next generation,
But colonial law will remove us with an injunction and put us in prison.
We want to honour our dead, but governments tell us that it “isn’t feasible.”
We want to speak our languages,
But so many of our language keepers have been lost to colonial violence.
Aren’t we tired of watching every single Indigenous woman kill herself to simply exist?
i hope shein gets shut down i hope ai projects get shut down i hope billionaires go bankrupt i hope public transportation expands fast i am so tired of the world’s bs
as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
It really boils down to three simple things:
Consent. Is the culture open to sharing this thing? (& don’t cheat by finding one person who consents while most of the culture disagrees.)
Context. If a culture is open to sharing a thing but it is a thing of great religious significance, take the time to learn what is a respectful way to treat the thing. Probably don’t use it as random decoration or sexualize it unless that’s what it’s for.
Credit. Give credit and if possible, buy from the original creators so the money goes where the credit should be.
This is really useful to me personally because I’ve definitely caught myself losing sight of what cultural appropriation actually is, and why it matters, so thank you, and everybody else pay attention too
Anyway here’s some additions from the Maasai and Kikuyu, two grassy plain-dwelling groups from Eastern Africa that I think count as unfuckwithable
Feel like Poland should be included since we’re literally called “people of the fields” according to the etymology of Poland.
Also look at her GO
I’m Métis, here’s some of ours! You’ll notice it looks remarkably similar to the above.
We also have some less intricate clothing (if it looks a bit Victorian to you - that’s pretty much the right era for most of this!)
Can’t believe no one’s done it yet I will be the person to add the cowboys: Latin American focus.
Here is the Chilean huaso:
Gauchos, from primarily Argentina where they’re a large national symbol close to the level of cowboys in the US. Also gauchos are in Uruguay. Their pants are called bombachas and the other garment wrapped around them are called chiripas. They work in grasslands called pampas, known for being really fertile:
While they’re not as dressed up as the others or have as prominent of a culture, for a broader Latin American cowboy context, I feel like also adding llaneros, who are from Colombia and Venezuela, in the llanos region, a type of tropical grassland similar to the pampas, hence the name llanero. Pampas get annual flooding and these guys would go barefoot a lot, and you can see that the stirrup on the horse’s saddle is really different than what you’re probably used to seeing, to accommodate for that, which is what I want to point out as an aspect of plains cultures developing clothing/accessories/tools to suit the environment.
Cowboy culture happened wherever Spanish colonial influence and grassland biomes came together. They differ based on the grasslands having different climates (ex tropical in South America), and the local indigenous influence (ex, backtracking to gauchos, they would use this tool called bolas to catch animals, which were basically two balls tied to a string that you threw and it spun around an animals legs, and were an indigenous invention):
I would love to keep posting cowboy dress lol but will stick to the post’s theme of grassland of course.
Adding to the post, I, hereby, present people of Kalash and Chitral:
Chitral means ‘field’ in the native language Khowar. Both Chitralis and people of Kalash are known to be indigenous people of Asia.
I’m not sure how much of it is innate and how much of it is imitative, but a thing I’ve always found interesting about feline vocalisation is that they enunciate for emphasis in pretty much the same way that humans do, so when a cat is being emphatic you can literally hear the exclamation point.
it is of utmost importance that everyone read these tags:
