November is National Native American Heritage Month: I know people like my kid’s teacher mean well, but what they and many others don’t understand is that those paper Indians you’re making with your students, or those paper headdresses kids will wear in the school play, and the stories told about the first Thanksgiving are doing little more than perpetuating harmful stereotypes and racism. Why are they racist? Because they uphold the systemic oppression that comes with erasure. To put it another way, the subliminal message – and one that is fortified by pop culture – is that Native Americans aren’t living, contemporary people. To the average American, Natives look a certain way, act a certain way, and are neat props in romanticized timelines of US history. And if we don’t exist in a modern context, then our issues get overlooked and we begin to question our own identities. That’s the real harm of these stereotypes. Excerpts from: everydayfeminism/2014/11/free-the-fringe-6-ways-to-de-stereotype-native-american-heritage-month/
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 20:15:03 +0000
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