Check the tag on that “Indian” story. →
You’ve probably seen this one at least once:
An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.
Yup, you’ve all read that, and it gets my blood boiling every time I read the silly thing. But how can you tell people, “Ugh, please stop talking about the OMG SPESHUL AND SPIRITUAL NDNS, how can you sit there and fetishize Natives while not even bothering to acknowledge the racism?” Because people think they are telling you something good.
This whole article is worth reading, but here’s a really awesome summary of why stories like this are so appropriative:
It can be exciting and empowering at first to encounter a story like this, if it’s supposedly from your (generalised) nation. But I could analyse this story all day to point out how Christian and western influences run all the way through it, and how these principles contradict and overshadow indigenous ways of knowing. Let’s just sum it up more quickly though, and call it what it is: colonialsim.
And please. It does not matter if this sort of thing is done to or by other cultures too. The “they did it first” argument doesn’t get my kids anywhere either.
The replacement of real indigenous stories with Christian-influenced, western moral tales is colonialism, no matter how you dress it up in feathers and moccasins. It silences the real voices of native peoples by presenting listeners and readers with something safe and familiar. And because of the wider access non-natives have to sources of media, these kinds of fake stories are literally drowning us out.
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