Settlers appropriate – indigenes reappropriate: Simone J. D. Anter, ‘I See You – A Story from the Haudenosaunee’, American Indian Law Journal, 6, 2, 1, 2018 | settler colonial studies blog

Settlers appropriate – indigenes reappropriate: Simone J. D. Anter, ‘I See You – A Story from the Haudenosaunee’, American Indian Law Journal, 6, 2, 1, 2018

17May18

Excerpt: Stories matter. They are a way of disrupting the status quo and adding a voice in a room of silence. As Native scholars and critical race theorists have emphasized, who tells the stories, who listens to them, and what they say are crucial. Tell any Indian a story of how something was created and they will tell you a story back about how Indians invented that very same thing. America tells a story about Indians; it tells the tale of an anachronistic figure, one that is no longer in the modern world: the vanishing Indian. If something or someone is no longer there, then the unauthorized use of their very image, their very culture, is not problematic. If Indians are in fact gone, then there is no harmful consequence in taking Native cultural property and appropriating it. There is a clear dissonance in society’s mind between the image and culture of Indians and actual real Indian people. As people smoke their Spirit cigarettes, drive their Jeep Cherokees, cheer on the Washington Redskins, fly military missions with Apache helicopters, launch Tomahawk missiles from warships at sea, chew their bubblegum, and play lacrosse, they ironically almost never think about actual Native people.

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