Dwanna Robertson: Cultural appropriation rears its ugly head again

When Christine Fallin, daughter of Oklahoma governor, Mary Fallin, released a photo of herself wearing a headdress on March 6, she sparked outrage among people who belong to the 37-plus Native Nations established in Oklahoma and across Indian country, in general. To add insult to injury, on March 7, Fallin released a statement—not to apologize—but to justify her actions because of her “deeper connection to the Native American culture,” the emotional “aesthetic” of the headdress, and her “genuine spiritual connection to Native American values.”

It should come as no surprise to Native folk that non-Natives still feel entitled to appropriate, take, and distort sacred indigenous cultural artifacts and symbols. Indeed, from the time of Columbus to now, such acts of racist entitlement has been accomplished by placing those who have been racialized as not-white outside of the moral community. Columbus did this when he judged Native people as culturally inferior because of their nakedness and easy-going natures. Consequently, on three separate journeys, Columbus and his shipmates, with their colonial mindsets of domination and superiority, took Natives captive and then raped, enslaved, sold, and murdered thousands of them.

Over the last 500+ years, the portrayal of Native people as savages, Native women as sexually-permissive, and indigenous cultures as engendering laziness has been used to rationalize the cultural appropriation, resource theft, degradation, and genocide of indigenous peoples. While Columbus’s atrocious record is relatively unknown, indigenous peoples have continued to live under the historical pervasiveness of racist depictions and ethnic fraud of Native identity and cultures for hundreds of years.