Follow-up thoughts on Cultural Appropriation...

So, back in April, I wrote this post about Cultural Appropriation.  And it was a new set of thoughts for me.  They were ideas that I had not spent time mulling over before that moment.  And at the time, I concluded that it was a grey area and I went ahead with the project... And at the time, that was a huge cop-out.

But I've been mulling it over all summer.  And in the meantime, I've been studying feminism, reading books about women's spirituality, and reading about religious archaeology.  And along the way, I've been noticing strong correlations between my own growing feminist sensitivity, and the expressed sensitivity of those who did think that a white lady making dreamcatcher artwork was tasteless and offensive.

And here's my #1 thought that is leading my growing sensitivity:

A person in a position of privilege does not get to define the parameters of what makes people in a position of oppression feel oppressed.  Period.  

To make the point as blunt as possible:

A person suffers PTSD from having been repeatedly violently and sexually abused.  The person is shamed as a result of this abuse and told to keep it a secret.  Told not to talk about it, because people will call you "bad" for making them feel uncomfortable... As a result of this abuse and shaming, the wound festers over time and gnaws at that person's ability to fully and freely be their happiest, most powerful selves.  

 And this person is going along their daily life, the one in which they mostly pretend that everything is fine, and someone who fits the basic socioeconomic, racial, and gender category as their rapist, makes a rape joke.  Maybe it's only something as simple as, "Oh man, that bitch was asking for it".... it's a joke... it's not serious... The person making this offhand comment is Not A Rapist.  And our dear PTSD sufferer is triggered with shadows of violation.  They try to respond to say, "when you say things like that, it really upsets me, and I would like you to choose different words to express yourself with."  

And how often do you think that Not A Rapist replies with a respectful, "oh, I didn't realized my words... I will be more conscious and respectful of that in the future..."  How often do you think that happens?  VERY FUCKING SELDOM.  A much more likely response is, "Oh, you just need to be less sensitive.  I didn't mean anything by it.  It was just a joke.  What are you, the Thought Police?"  

Having experienced both of these responses from men and sometimes women at various times in my own life, in various situations, I can say that even in a progressive, "liberal" community, even in a community of activists fighting against oppression, the "fuck off, bitch" response is WAY MORE COMMON.  Plenty of times I have been the one expressing offensive jokes.  And as often as not, when called on it, my own responses were dismissive of other people's lived experience... I think that I have gotten better at accepting and respecting the experiences of others, even when it means that I need to check myself...

So, to come back from the blunt, and move towards the more subtle; to view the whole system in a unified way...

Why is the sensitivity of that one victim so important...?  Why do we have to tiptoe around those few injured people...?  Because it is not just a few injured people.  It is ALL OF US.  Every single human on the whole planet...  What???  Surely I am expressing an obnoxious hyperbole, you might say... but let's look at some numbers:

One out of every four women in the United States has been raped, or beaten by an intimate partner.  New York Times, Dec 14, 2011

 ONE IN FOUR WOMEN.  To put another way, within a four generation cycle of women - 5yo daughter, 30yo mother, 60yo grandmother, 85yo great-grandmother - in EVERY family, one of those women has been sexually assaulted.

From another perspective: one out of every four men is a rapist or has beaten his intimate partner.  ONE IN FOUR MEN.  In your own family, sons, father, grandfathers, great-grandfathers... one of those men have committed a rape.

[I have had several people question me about the statistical accuracy of this assertion.  Rather than come up with a quick correction or defense, I feel the content of a follow-up blog post brewing in me... to be posted in the next few days.]

The statistics for the rest of the world are not better (And prevalence of rape does not appear to correlate strongly to whether or not a country is "developed" wikipedia article of rape statistics).

So worldwide, we have this gaping wound of trauma... trauma of violating the sanctity and sovereignty of another person's body.  A trauma of acting without consent and a trauma of victimizing and torturing ourselves.  We see it reflected in our relationship with the land... our relationship with our brother and sister creatures of different species.  A trauma of universal self-destruction and self-punishment.  And the first step in healing is to begin naming and acknowledging the wounds.

In my own family, my maternal grandmother was abused as a child.  She never spoke about it in much detail but she spoke of physical violence.  As a child at the turn of the century in Richmond, VA, it is a fair assumption there was sexual abuse.  Later, in her marriage to my grandfather, there was again physical and sexual violence, leading her to eventually run away in the night to the home of friends, as her only safe option for leaving my grandfather.  And how could I expect that this violence and abuse did not affect my grandmother's children; my mother and my aunt and my uncle.  Even if they were never the direct victims of his anger and abuse, to grow up in a home where their mother is in fear of their father... would have a deep affect on anyone's identity and psyche.  This story was spoken of very little in my own memory.  It is only in this past year, on a journey of healing and seeking, that I have begun dredging up these memories, talking with my sister about them, and thinking about how the legacy of that trauma has impacted my own life.  And it has impacted my life very deeply...

So rape jokes are not funny because we all, every one of us, carry the victim/perpetrator legacy of rape.  The jokes are not funny because they trivialize and minimalize the wound instead of letting it heal...

So back to the dreamcatchers I made... those are different, right?  My thoughtful artwork that happens to appropriate the styles and motifs of a native tradition are not equivalent to a rape joke, are they?  Except that they kinda are.

Because Mt Rushmore is roughly equivalent to the Nazis having carved a giant portrait of Hitler into a cliffside of Mt Sinai (sacred mountain of judaism...).  Ok now, before you get revved-up to accuse me of hyperbole again (because yes, I am sometimes prone to it...): in this statement I am 100% earnest and serious.

The "final solution" of the North American Indian problem was the model for the subsequent Jewish holocaust and South African apartheid

      Why is the biggest holocaust in all humanity being hidden from history? Is it because it lasted so long that it has become a habit? It's been well documented that the killing of Indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere since the beginning of colonization has been estimated at 120 million. Yet nobody wants to speak about it.

      Today historians, anthropologists and archaeologists are revealing that information on this holocaust is being deliberately eliminated from the knowledge base and consciousness of North Americans and the world. A completely false picture is being painted of our people as suffering from social ills of our own making.  By Kahentinetha Horn, MNN Mohawk Nation News Jan. 30, 2005

“Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination – by starvation and uneven combat – of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”  – P. 202, “Adolph Hitler” by John Toland 

And the death tole of our holocaust is 100 million people.  To put that in perspective compared to the WWII Holocaust:

That is the destruction of an entire continent of hundreds of thriving civilizations.  "Of course, as the scoffers point out, regardless of the true number of indigenous inhabitants in North America at the point of contact with Europeans, the great bulk of them died, not as the result of direct military action, or at the hands of some Euroamerican equivalent of the nazi's killing squads, but as the reult of famine and disease.  This is said as if such a type of death were a purely natural phenomenon, a matter absolving the invader of responsibility for such an outcome.  Far from naturally, however, the mass starvation at issue was largely induced through he deliberate dislocation of indigenous nations from their traditional homelands, the impounding of their resources, and the destruction of their economies through military or paramilitary action. (The State of North America,  Introduction: The Holocaust in North America by M. Annette, Jaimes)

So... here we are with this gaping open wound in our Great American Collective Unconscious... No one talks about it, because it is uncomfortable... no one feels responsible for it, personally, because that happened hundreds of years ago... Actually it happened between the last 1-500 years, is still happening today.  If you need proof of the ongoing reality of this oppression and trauma to native peoples, just read the latest issue of National Geographic: "In the Shadow of Wounded Knee" August 2012.

And again, how can I personally take responsibility for this history?  What resources do I have at hand to begin healing this wound within myself, the wound that is within all of us?  For starters, I can resist the sexist oppression that works to silence my voice, works to convince me that my body and my image do not belong to me.  I can stand up as a strong and self-realized feminist.  And from my position of white, middle-class privilege, I can begin to be a conscious and proactive ally for cultural minorities, victims of genocide... through my artwork and my speech, through my lifestyle decisions and how I choose to spend my money.  I can choose to respect the art forms of those traditions and leave them to the people they belong to.  Not to keep them stagnant, in a museum case, but to re-interpret and evolve those symbols in reference to their own cultures and their own lives.

And to be more specific about why it is offensive for a white person to make and sell something that is obviously a dreamcatcher, in any medium:

"They came for our land, for what grew or could be grown on it, for the resources in it, and for our clean air and pure water.  They stole these things from us, and in taking the also stole our free ways and the best of our leaders, killed in battle or assassinated.  And now, after all that, they've come for the very last of our possessions; now they want our pride, our history, our spiritual traditions.  They want to rewrite and remake these things, to claim them for themselves.  The lies and thefts just never end."  Margo Thunderbird, 1988 from The State of Native America pg 403

 "The term 'whiteshaman'... belongs to the apparently growing number of small-press poets of generall white, Euro-Christian American background, who in their poems assume the persona of the shaman, usually in the guise of an American Indian medicine man.  To be a poet is simply not enough; they must claim a power from higher sources." pg 403

"Whiteshamans and their defenders, assuming a rather amazing gullibility on the part of American Indians, usually contend they are 'totally apolitical.'  ...  They often add the insulting caveat that American Indian writers know less of their ancestral traditions and culture than non-native anthropologists.  Finally, most argue that 'artistic license' or 'freedom of speech' inherently empowers them to do what they do, no matter whether Indians like it (and, ultimately, no matter the cost to native societies).  Native American scholars, writers, and activists have heard these polemics over and over again.  It is time to separate fact from fantasy in this regard."  pg 405
"The Great Pretenders: Further Reflections on Whiteshamanism" by Wendy Rose from The State of Native North America 

So in conclusion... there are about thirty of my bicycle Dream Catchers floating around the world now, five for six of which are hanging in public, in bike shops around Seattle.  I didn't end up making any monetary profit off of the project - possibly due to my own growing discomfort with the offense of the composition.  But what do I do with them?  Shall I run around Seattle collecting them all and destroying them?  Shall I take all of the images of them off of the internet?  That feels scary... like killing a part of my own fragile, budding artistic expression.  But maybe it would be a ceremonial killing of that part of myself that was unknowingly complicit in cultural genocide... I have not decided.  I do know that moving forward, if I choose to continue doing weaving work in circular compositions, I will try very hard to make them look distinctly different from dreamcatchers.  And I am now very conscious of my responsibility as an artist to resist the temptation to engage in whiteshamanism.  When one starts to become sensitive to such a thing, you begin to realize how sickening prevalent it is...

Moving forward, I am working on naming the cultural and psychic wounds that I carry in myself, as victim and perpetrator of oppression and genocide.  Moving forward I can begin to create my own proactive strategies for healing these wounds in my life and my communities.