WHAT DO CORN MEAL, CANDY, MULTI-COLORED CORN STOCKS AND BUTTER HAVE TO DO WITH NATIVE AMERICANS? IF THE COMPANIES ARE NOT NATIVE OWNED, THEN WHY THE CULTURALLY APPROPRIATED NATIVE CHARACTER?
Nike's new Air Native N7 is the new sneaker brand name designed especially for Native Americans. This is the first time Nike has designed a shoe for a specific race or ethnicity. With a "culturally specific look" and a wider, higher design, it is meant to cater to the specific foot needs of Native Americans. The design sounds pretty cool: there are feathers inside and stars on the sole to represent the night sky. These are referred to as "heritage callouts," and are accompanied by "sunrise to sunset to sunrise patterns on the tongue and heel of the shoe."
WOW, just when we thought sneakers couldn't get any worse. Thank you Nike for culturally appropriating sacred symbols. Also thanks for assuming that those symbols mean the same thing for all tribes. Also thanks for having these "Native Sneakers" accessible in cost to your target consumer. You call it "Heritage Callouts" I call it stealing, assimilation and appropriation!!
In September, NARF Staff Attorney Mark Tilden represented the National Indian Child Welfare Association (NICWA) and provided testimony for the Wisconsin Legislature on a LRB 0150/3, which would enact a state Indian Child Welfare Act into law.
To begin, Tilden testified that the bill is designed to remedy the continuing problem of Native American children being disproportionately over-represented in the substitute care system. Tilden discussed the history of the federal Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), stating that Congress intended to give the ICWA a broad scope because of the massive problem it meant to remedy.
AR Sakaeda, who wrote one of my favorite essays for Exploring Race last year, sent me an email recently about issues to consider in representing Native Americans. Because Thanksgiving is a popular time for teaching students about Native Americans, here’s a list of guidelines that come from Oyate, a Native organization that wants to make sure the history of Native Americans is portrayed with honesty and accuracy.
Over the years, more schools have been eliminating the practice of kids dressing up as Indians, but apparently there is still much resistance. The Tribune covered a Skokie school in 2003 that decided to discontinue the costumes. That same year, the YMCA also decided to end its "Indian Guides and Princesses" program.
Tell me what you think about the list:
• Do present Native peoples as appropriate role models with whom a Native child can identify. Don't single out Native children, ask them to describe their families' traditions, or their people's cultures. Don't assume that you have no Native children in your class. Don't do or say anything that would embarrass a Native child.
• Do look for books and materials written and illustrated by Native people. Don't use ABC books that have "I is for Indian"' or "E is for Eskimo." Don't use counting books that count "Indians." Don't use story books that show non-Native children "playing Indian." Don't use picture books by non-Native authors that show animals dressed as "Indians." Don't use story books with characters like "Indian Two Feet" or "Little Chief."
• Do avoid arts and crafts and activities that trivialize Native dress, dance, or ceremony. Don't use books that show Native people as savages, primitive craftspeople, or simple tribal people, now extinct.
• Don't have children dress up as "Indians," with paperbag "costumes" or paper-feather "headdresses." Don't sing "Ten Little Indians." Don't let children do "war whoops." Don't let children play with artifacts borrowed from a library or museum. Don't have them make "Indian crafts" unless you know authentic methods and have authentic materials.
• Do make sure you know the history of Native peoples, past and present, before you attempt to teach it. Do present Native peoples as separate from each other, with unique cultures, languages, spiritual beliefs, and dress. Don't teach "Indians" only at Thanksgiving. Do teach Native history as a regular part of American history.
• Do use materials which put history in perspective. Don't use materials which manipulate words like "victory," "conquest," or "massacre" to distort history. Don't use materials which present as heroes only those Native people who aided Europeans. Do use materials which present Native heroes who fought to defend their own people.
• Do discuss the relationship between Native peoples and the colonists and what went wrong with it. Don't speak as though "the Indians" were here only for the benefit of the colonists. Don't make charts about "gifts the Indians gave us."
• Don't use materials that stress the superiority of European ways, and the inevitability of European conquest. Do use materials which show respect for, and understanding of, the sophistication and complexities of Native societies.
• Do use materials which show the continuity of Native societies, with traditional values and spiritual beliefs connected to the present. Don't refer to Native spirituality as "superstition." Don't make up Indian "legends" or "ceremonies." Don't encourage children to do "Indian" dances.
• Do use respectful language in teaching about Native peoples. Don't use insulting terms such as "brave," "squaw," "papoose," "Indian givers," "wild Indians," "blanket Indians," or "wagon burners."
• Do portray Native societies as coexisting with nature in a delicate balance. Don't portray Native peoples as "the first ecologists."
• Do use primary source material--speeches, songs, poems, writing--that show the linguistic skill of peoples who come from an oral tradition. Don't use books in which "Indian" characters speak in either "early jawbreaker" or in the oratorical style of the "noble savage."
• Do use materials which show Native women, Elders, and children as integral and important to Native societies. Don't use books which portray Native women and Elders as subservient to warriors.
• Do talk about lives of Native peoples in the present. Do read and discuss good poetry, suitable for young people, by contemporary Native writers. Do invite Native community members to the classroom. Do offer them an honorarium. Treat them as teachers, not as entertainers. Don't assume that every Native person knows everything there is to know about every Native Nation.
The Navajo used the word “nádleehí” to describe people who embodied both masculine and feminine traits. They were among the hundreds of Native communities that celebrated and revered tribe members who lived outside binary male/female restrictions. As today’s Native communities fight to revitalize the culture that was beaten out of them, gay and transgender Natives are reclaiming this aspect of their ancestry by identifying as two-spirit –- a unifying term that serves as a catch-all for the many variations of sexuality and gender identity.
Two-spirit people were seen as a gift in Native American culture, viewed as a third gender with a heightened spiritual connectedness and a significant role to play. However, the forced Western colonization injected tribal communities with strong anti-gay attitudes that, for the most part, continue to reign supreme today. As two-spirits try to reclaim their historical culture, it is vital for the LGBT community to start paying attention to history as well.
I had the honor of speaking with seasoned two-spirit activist Richard LaFortune, whose wisdom made it painfully clear how shortsighted the LGBT civil rights movement has become. While much of the current focus is on the state-by-state status of legal relationship recognition, LaFortune reveals that many Native cultures enjoyed marriage equality for same-sex couples well before European settlers arrived. It isn’t surprising that anti-gay activists didn’t bother to consult Native American history before constantly regurgitating “marriage has always been between one man and one woman” talking points.
Here is some good news to get through the rest of your hump day.
This December 13, Arizona’s Native community will be choosing this year’s Miss Indian Transgender Arizona.
Trudie Jackson, the director of the pageant, says the point of the pageant is to bring visibility to transgender people in the Native community and the issues they face. She said to NativeOut in an interview:
There are numerous issues that affect transgender people in their everyday life. One of the most challenging of these issues is gender identity. Some girls don’t know how to come out to their families, who reside on the reservations, about their lifestyles. When girls come to the city they are able to be themselves, instead of living in the closet. Another issue is employment. Since most girls are unable to be themselves in the work place, they have to find an alternate way of surviving in the city. Stigma is another issue affecting transgender women since the majority of the general population is not educated about transgenderism; they automatically assume they are “men in a dress.”
Check out the video below from 2007’s Miss Indian Transgender crowning.
Poet Joan Kane, an Inupiaq Eskimo woman, received the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. (It comes with $50,000!)
"My husband jokes that he's probably the only start-up lawyer whose practice is being kept afloat by his poet wife," she said.Some of the money will buy health insurance, she said.
She'd also like to take her children and her mother to King Island, an expensive and difficult proposition.
The remote settlement in the Bering Sea was abandoned under pressure from the government in the 1950s. Memories of the deserted village contribute to overtones of loss and change that haunt Kane's poems. King Islanders retain a strong sense of identity with the place, though members of the younger generation -- including Kane herself -- have never been there.
Kane hopes to visit small communities in the future, to talk about writing and "bring books to others."
"As a writer, you have to be concerned when you see all of these towns without bookstores," she said.
Pure/Pour/A Priori
full moon’s rays spill
a skeleton path on water
tell me the spell
you held me under
simpler to undo
than the first split steps
I took towards you.
Wrath and swell
of the silt-black sea
heavy and mute
with the weight
of so much ice melting
returns agency
to me, and ease.
Eyes travel,
trace along the shape
of pure coincidence;
sere white falls hued
through night air,
valuable, and silvers
on the waves.
Shafts of light
unravel, reeling
towards shore: shine
relearns its shadow image
and I relearn more.
I can scarcely scrape
and scratch my eyes
across the moon’s rough
surface. To conjure
this drag and chase down
the fixed spines of time
and the firm arrival
at some great vein
of truth appears
difficult. My own
divinations, though, draw
me down the coast
and raise my eyes high
despite the bone-bright
glance of the naked
skeleton path on the water.
— By Joan Kane
Young Aboriginal women used as a sex commodity in cities across Canada
On the street corners of Canada's largest cities, thousands of women are bought and sold every night.
Most of them, experts say, are aboriginal and an alarming number are trafficked.
"There's a total myth that Aboriginal women either consent to or are born into the sex trade," says Jo-Ann Daniels, interim executive director for the Metis Settlements General Council in Edmonton. "The average age of Aboriginal girls who are human trafficked is between seven and 12 years old."
In a four-part series running across the country this week, Sun Media looks at Canada's hidden trade in people; at the failure of this country to live up to its international obligations on human trafficking, to prosecute human traffickers and meaningfully help victims.
"It is Aboriginal girls and women who are specifically targeted in this country to be trafficked, in such huge numbers that it does not compare to any other population," Daniels says. "We believe that it is the root source of Aboriginal women ever being involved in the sex trade. We believe that Aboriginal women and Aboriginal girls have been domestically trafficked now for, I would say probably since the '50s when there began to be Aboriginal movement into urban areas or there were more contacts between Aboriginal communities and towns."
Aboriginal trafficking has been identified as a unique problem in government reports, non-governmental newsletters and at human trafficking conferences.
Poverty, abuse, racism and troubled historical relations have all been cited as reasons for the Aboriginal population falling victim to Canada's flesh trade at a far higher rate than non-Aboriginals.
FEW ARE LISTENING
But those in the know suggest few are listening and little or nothing is being done to deal with the indiscriminate exploitation of this population.
Members of the Institute for the Advancement of Aboriginal Women (IAAW) in Edmonton began to hear stories from Aboriginal women about how they got involved in sex work after publishing their 2006 Crime Against Aboriginal Women report, says Daniels, a former policy analyst for IAAW.
"There was so few of them who had consented. There were so few of them who got any support to even recognize that they had been domestically trafficked," Daniels recalls.
Given the total lack of statistics gathered on domestic trafficking in this country, it is no wonder there is nothing to accurately illustrate exactly how many Aboriginal people are being trafficked. But this is what is known:
- More than 500 Aboriginal women have gone missing or been murdered in Canada over the last few decades.
- According to research conducted by gang expert Michael Chettleburgh, 90% of the teenaged, urban prostitutes in Canada are Aboriginal.
- About 75% of Aboriginal girls under 18 have been sexually abused, says Anupriya Sethi, who has researched the issue. Of those, half are under 14 and nearly a quarter are younger than seven.
"According to the Department of Justice and other witnesses, Aboriginal girls and women are at greater risk of becoming victims of trafficking within and outside Canada," notes the February 2007 report on human trafficking from the Standing Committee on Status of Women.
The report noted accounts from several experts about poverty, abuse and poor living conditions driving Aboriginal women into trafficking.
"Basically their handlers start them in Vancouver," Chantal Tie, a lawyer with the National Association of Women and The Law, told the committee.
"They work for them there for awhile, then they're sold to someone in Winnipeg and then to someone in Toronto, and so on down the line as they get moved around the country."
The RCMP's National Aboriginal Policing Service wanted to examine the issue further, the report noted, but lacked the funding and human resources to do so.
Later that year, the First Peoples Child and Family Review published a report by Sethi after she spent five months interviewing 18 "key informants," who ranged from trafficking victims to front-line service providers for sexually exploited women.
Sethi identified trafficking triangles through which Aboriginal victims are moved: Saskatoon-Edmonton-Calgary-Saskatoon; Saskatoon-Regina-Winnipeg-Saskatoon.
"These triangles are linked and they're spread all across Canada," Sethi says in an interview from Ottawa. "One of the trafficked women who I spoke with said that you sleep in the night and you're in Montreal and in the morning you wake up and you're in Vancouver."
"I don't know if there are international linkages," she says. "Once you're in Vancouver, are you taken? Once you're in Toronto, are you taken to New York or do you go to Los Angeles? I don't know. It hasn't been explored."
In big cities like Montreal, Aboriginal girls from northern communities are plucked right from the airport, Sethi says.
"Traffickers often know someone in the community who informs them about the plans of the girls moving to the city. Upon their arrival at the airport, traffickers lure the girls under the pretext of providing a place to stay or access to resources," she notes in her report.
'YOUNG, NAIVE'
Sethi quotes an Aboriginal outreach worker as such: "Girls tend to believe in the promises of the traffickers as they are young, naive and vulnerable in a new and big city. They are unsuspecting of the motives of the traffickers, since they belong to communities that have a culture of welcoming strangers."
Experts cite various reasons these girls are leaving their communities.
"Aboriginal communities are facing huge issues, whether it's poverty or homelessness, sexual exploitation," Sethi says. "If you escape all that and there is this person who is targeting you... (who) offers you a shelter, offers you a job or better prosperous life, it's very easy to buy in."
"I haven't seen the image that I think people have in their head about people being scooped off reserves and taken other places," says Anette Sikka, who is researching the issue at the University of Ottawa.
"Chronic runaways are a real issue with trafficking in the Prairie Provinces," she says. "It tends to be if a young girl has run away a number of times, people stop looking." Experts interviewed by the Sun agree common factors that contribute to non-Aboriginal victims being forced into the sex trade -- such as poverty, drugs and abuse -- are much more prevalent in Aboriginal communities.
"There's a lot that unites us as Canadians, whether we're African Canadian, white or Aboriginal. But there are some distinctions with the Aboriginal community that I don't think most policy makers truly understand," says Chettleburgh. "The generation of young at-risk Aboriginals we have right now, many of them are the product of parents that went through the residential school experience and they've lost that touch with what makes them Indian."
"THIS IS ALL THEIR FAULT'
"I think there is a conception in people's minds that Aboriginal people aren't doing anything, this is all their fault, without making a connection to the whole issue of colonization and what colonization has done to harm the healthy development of Aboriginal people," says Marlyn Bennett, director of research for the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada in Winnipeg. "You have parents who don't know how to be parents."
Like international trafficking cases, in some Aboriginal communities, the exploitation is familial -- fathers and uncles exchanging incest for food and shelter, Sethi says.
"It's the whole bigger picture and if you miss it, then you'll miss the point," Sethi says. "How many Aboriginal men healing centres have you heard about?"
While experts have cited instances of Aboriginal victims being recruited by Asian and Somali gangs, says Chettleburgh: "There's no shortage of Aboriginal on Aboriginal victimization in the country." He points to Winnipeg where large gangs such as Indian Posse, Native Syndicate and Red Alert "are definitely running the girls on the street."
"I could take you to north Winnipeg, show you a street corner in the middle of a Monday afternoon, you'll have three girls, 12, 14, working the corners. Obviously they're being pimped out by gang members, but their customers are white guys driving middle class sedans that have come from the 'burbs, who are paying for their $20 (sex acts) in back alleys and they disappear back to where they came from."
In Hobbema, a notoriously crime-laden reserve south of Edmonton, young women who have identified themselves as Indian Posse Girls claim to run the prostitution rings, Chettleburgh says.
"And largely their customers aren't the domestic demand," he adds. "It's these guys that are driving through the community looking for a score."
"Things like this don't happen without racism being the core cause," Daniels says with emphatic frustration. "The number one killer in this country for Aboriginal women isn't diabetes or cancer. It's rape-slash-murder. It can grow to such horrific heights and still, what's happening? Where's the human outcry? If it happened to soccer moms, it would be a completely different story all together."
"Just simply being an Aboriginal woman puts you at risk. I can go and stand on the corner of 108th St. and Jasper Ave. (in Edmonton) waiting for a ride to come along and I will get solicited," she says. "Aboriginal women who smoke, they'll go out on the side there, away from the entrance of their business buildings, of their offices, and they'll get solicited. It's a real problem. That's how racialized the sex industry is in this country.
'TARGETS ABORIGINALS'
"It just so targets Aboriginal women."
Asked for an estimate of the number of Aboriginal women and girls being trafficked in Canada, Daniels pauses.
"At this point, I would say hundreds," she says. "If we say thousands, I don't know if that's 99,000 or 3,000. So just hundreds at this point."
"The women out there now, tragically are --" her voice trails off. "I don't know how to say this. There's just a lot of Aboriginal women and girls out there."
Those who care have made several recommendations to the government: Look closer. Come up with a plan. Save our children. But where is the response?
Even the U.S. State department acknowledges the problem, noting it in their 2008 Trafficking in Persons report: "Canadian girls and women, many of whom are Aboriginal, are trafficked internally for commercial sexual exploitation," the report says.
The Aboriginal issue hasn't been ignored, Winnipeg MP Joy Smith, who co-chaired last year's Status of Women report, says just days before the federal election is announced. The only reason Smith, who has passionately taken on the issue of human trafficking for several years, can give for her government not addressing Aboriginal trafficking is that they can't get anything done with a minority government.
Human trafficking can't be ruled out when considering all the missing Aboriginal women in this country, Bennett says.
"Where are all these women? Where are they? Are they dead?" she says.
"Whether these women are being moved around, we don't know that and we need to look at that and we need to find out."
"It's very rare with regards to the Aboriginal population that somebody goes in for money into voluntary sex work," Sethi says. "Unless we take a step back and see why it's happening, we'll never be able to get through this problem. We'll always see it as voluntary prostitution and their problem."
"Either it's ignorance or it's stereotype or it's total indifference or it's racism or it's a mix of all these factors," she says. "Before we go any further into prevention and targeted initiatives, let's just start acknowledging that this issue is human trafficking and not just sex work."
Artist Brian Jungen says that one of the best ways to get people to look at artwork is to create it out of materials that they recognize. Visitors to Jungen's exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., will recognize plenty of the materials that compose Jungen's work — everything from basketball sneakers to plastic chairs to baseball gloves.
Jungen's exhibit is the first solo show of a living Native American artist at the Museum of the American Indian. He says that much of his work is a response to the hostility and stereotypes that he faced as a person of First Nations ancestry.
| Transgender Navajo murdered in Albuquerque | | Print | |
| Written by NativeOUT |
| Wednesday, 08 July 2009 05:57 |
| A transgender Navajo, Teri Benally, 42, was found beaten to death in the 500 block of Maple SE in Albuquerque, New Mexico at 1am this morning. Teri is the third transgender Navajo murdered in this area since 2005. Fredrick Watson, 32, was killed June 9 this year and Ryan Shey Hoskie, 23, was found beaten to death in January 2005. Visit KRQE.com to read more about these murders. FRED MARTINEZ PROJECT TWO SPIRIT GATHERING 2009: |
Athletes say sport promotes courage, resilience, strong work ethic
Washington — A skateboard, symbolic of youthful risk-taking and fearlessness, might seem an unlikely route to responsible adulthood. But because it promotes self-discipline and perseverance, skateboarding — among the most popular sports on Indian reservations across the United States — is a transformative experience for many indigenous athletes, according to a new exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).
Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America (on display through September 13, 2009) showcases the vibrancy and creativity of American Indian skate culture, while also tracing the sport’s evolution and highlighting the achievements of tribe-affiliated skaters. In a recent interview with America.gov, Betsy Gordon — NMAI’s project manager for the Ramp It Up exhibition — explained that skateboarding affirms the importance of “courage, strength and resilience,” facilitating “the passing of Native values in a modern medium.” It also has spawned its own genre of popular music, graphic art and design, photography and filmmaking, and entrepreneurship that revolves around the competitive skateboard circuit frequented by young athletes on and off the reservations.
