Joy Harjo: Another lame defense of cultural misappropriation

When Christina Fallin put on that fake Indian headdress she knew what she was doing. She’s smart in an educated institutional current theory way. When she called her stunt Appropriate Culturation, she was familiar with the phrase cultural appropriation. To culturally appropriate is to take something that has intrinsic meaning in one culture and use it in a secular manner in another. It’s Buddhas on see-through t-shirts, it’s minstrels performing in blackface, and it’s an American Indian headdress on a white girl.

We know the Plains headdress, or warbonnet, is a powerful image. Within the indigenous cultures it comes from, it represents honor and power. The man wearing it has been acknowledged as a person worthy of great respect. Highly symbolic, headdresses are of great spiritual importance and were only to be worn by the consent of tribe leaders, usually on ceremonial occasions. But in the popular catalogue of images of Indians in America, it represents all natives. It pronounces us wild and majestic, a warrior people who once were but do not exist now.

Now, if you’re following me, you can begin to see what happens when a non-native girl dons a fake Plains headdress in a calculated publicity stunt. First, she assumes that everything is available to her for use in her art. It’s the cultural assumption of a settler mentality that pervades American culture. It’s behind the Redskin mascot issue. When you’re a people who have been disappeared from the culture into a distant past, and are frozen in imagination in chase by the U.S. Cavalry, then you aren’t real.

When your people are the survivors of a holocaust of unimaginable dimensions, your presence is held at a great distance, a distance determined by the weight of guilt. Imagine an Africa with no Africans! Indigenous peoples in this country are now one-half of one percent of the population. We are essentially disappeared as real people in the American imagination and for the most part exist there as stereotypes.