Elissa Washuta: I was wrong about 'Naughty Native' costume

I’m not much for costumes, but a party invitation sent me to the basement of a vintage clothing store that, come October, looks like a pack of My Little Ponies vomited on the racks. I got so overwhelmed by polyurethane, taffeta, fake fur and prints of all persuasions that it was impossible to focus on any costume long enough to identify it as “Playful Panda” or “Marie Antoinette.” There was a half-wall devoted to the Wild West and the Native people as they have been imagined there, brave, fierce and tragic. Fringed and beaded polyester “buckskin” Pocahontas or Sacajawea costumes — the difference wasn’t clear, though the women lived a continent apart — mingled with fringed “leather” Buffalo Bill jackets for the men. Cowboy hats and rainbow-dyed faux-feather headdresses hung alongside soundless miniature drums, plastic tomahawks and knives, toy guns and holsters, cotton moccasins, and plastic breastplates and necklaces. There were chaps of all kinds. These lifeless duds lumped caricatures of indigenous peoples and colonizers together in peaceful coexistence, a state of pure make-believe.

The display appalled me. As a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, a descendant of the Cascade/Watlala people, and a light-skinned Native with a bundle of identity issues, I was tired of the sludge I had waded through since the principal of my elementary school asked me in third grade whether my people would prefer to be called “Indians” or “Native Americans.” Too many times to count, I had stifled my desire to lash out when being told I wasn’t “Indian-Indian” because I don’t resemble an Edward Curtis portrait or being asked “how much” Indian I am so the admission of my quantum might explain whether I’m a bona fide full blood or a one-drop pretender. As far as much of the world was concerned, Hollywood had stuck all of us in the same museum case, thrust headdresses onto our skulls, and slapped up an exhibition label explaining that we knew everything about using all parts of the buffalo and nothing about how to tolerate alcohol. I come from salmon people who know rivers and work cedar, but the Columbia River Gorge must have been too far west for the westerns.