Mary McDonnell's hair is The Man!

I came across Dances With Wolves on TV this week and watched it while doing other stuff--hadn't seen it since college, when my girlfriend Delyriam and I ate eggplant parmesan and mocked it. I stopped watching as of their wedding so I wouldn't have to see the sad parts that wikipedia warned me were coming.

Still don't understand why Stands With a Fist, a woman raised from childhood like any other Lakota woman

(like the one played by Tantoo Cardinal)

had messy hair (the #1 source of mine and Delyriam's jokes.) 

According to Random Internet Dude McDonnell chose the 'do herself because it was realistic in re. how your hair would look on the windswept prairies. I would add--realistic if you have Anglo hair that knots easily, like mine. In which case, all the more reason why I would always wear my hair in braids! If you had smoother hair, you'd probably still braid it most of the time, because it's painful and obnoxious to have hair whipped in your face!

But the proof is in the photographic record anyway, so McDonnell doesn't need have theorized.

They obviously did it to make her look more contemporary, or more white, or whatever. She even has layers and bangs lol. And for heaven's sake, to anyone out there with pioneering grandmothers from the prairies, did they leave the sod roofed cabin looking like this either? Of course not! No one wore their hair this way except us! In 1990, the year the movie was made, the year I graduated high school.

Stands With a Diploma

(Same haircut as Mary, but combed.)

This isn't a deep point. But it was just as annoying in 2011 as it was 20 years ago and therefore merited a post. Heh!

      

Take the headdress OFF!

Is this what happens when you aren't part of a campus anymore and aren't watching MTV? You don't realize that the latest hipster trend is to wear aboriginal headdresses?

Ohhhhh maaaaan. When I returned to university in 2003 only the Engineering students were pulling dumb shit like this. (Or was it my first degree in the 90's??) Were they ahead of their time? Will those dreadlock wigs be the fashion in 2012?

Of course, you know who I blame:

That was 2004. Andre 3000's never apologized, doubtless because he's "part Native American"...  just like 90% of North Americans seems to claim.

So here we are, 2011, and it's in the music videos...

...in the ads...

... on the celebrities...

Jared Leto

Kesha

...in the magazines...

...in the stores...

...and on every white person at the Coachella music festival. (Sorry I didn't credit these pics above and below, but they're all from the Hipster Appropriations tumblr. They've got zillions of them.)

 

If you don't think wearing a hipster headdress is Inappropriate then go here. And if you still don't, then you can join some of the naysayers in the comments. What really struck me was how many of them put forward a new sort of argument that I assume is coming from a younger age group, that goes like this: There's no culture anymore, everyone's exploited, don't waste your time trying to stop it.

It kind of disturbs me. 

If this view were truly representative of Today's Youth I would go to bed and stay there like Brian Wilson. However I know it's not, thank the Lord of Appropriate Head Gear. Here's a taste:

 
* it's 2010. there is no culture anymore. you should just be happy people still think of natives when they see a head-dress. 

* nobody "owns" their culture - there's too much variations and too many similarities of the human kind in various cultures around the world for anyone to claim anything. I hope that Ms. Baldwin actually got the point here as well. And again, Indian tribes/nations have no cultures, just like Irish immigrants in America have no culture. The one culture that unites us is the USA culture, and that culture is the only relevant one in this conversation.

* It is idealist to think that YOUR culture and YOUR cultural item won't be exploited for fashion or social comment, when all other culture is exploited to. This generation (in the west anyway) and all others to come to have freedoms, socially, economically and morally that no angry blog is going to curb or undo. Save your breath.

* I think this point of view is painfully old-fashioned. The Internet has created a melting pot of Ancient, Present, Past, and Future cultures from all around the world. And at this point, everyone is fully aware of what stereotypes are and what "PC" is, and going on about them is only going to perpetuate them.... Everyone is connected and everyone is mixed, this is a new tribe of people. A handmade headdress (and not the dime store "cowboys and indians" plastic version) is sacred to anyone who wears it and certainly to anyone who makes it.

Save us all. :-o  

Cheer us up Graham Greene!

         

Studying race; and Powwows: Ur doing it wrong

So I'm back in research mode for the revision of my last novel. My protagonist is half Mohawk and half... Nuu-cha-nulth or Snuneymuxw. Thing is I know Nanaimo better, which is where the Snuneymuxw people are... so why did I choose Nuu-cha-nulth last time, who are further North around Port Alberni where I've never been? I don't know, I'm sure I had a reason, like maybe there was an online verbal dictionary. But there's one now, for the Halkomelem language. (I started this book in 2003, a lot's changed on the netserland.)

Anyway. So it's back to researching again, because there are new resources available. Such as Tumblr.

I remember reading once that in the race of facebook vs myspace, something interesting came out--that more African-Americans were using myspace. Well, I recently came across a whole bunch of Native American and some Canadian aboriginal Tumblr blogs. So I created a Tumblr blog for my book, in order to easily bookmark things.

And it means I'm back into reading race politics again. I'm reading a book about a guy who went back to live on his Six Nations reserve... well that's not a very political book, except about internal politics. But soon I'll be reading Writing the Other, which is considered The Book on writing... well, the other. And I'm reading and following all these aboriginal Tumblrs, so I find myself dancing off into various corners of the internet, following the trail of interesting stories.

Like this one, about five girls who showed up at a Powwow dressed like this:

A friend took the picture and sent it to a person who runs a blog on cultural appropriation. What shocked her in particular is that these girls were from a high school across from Stanford U where according to one commentor everyone is Crème de la crème politically correct (Eg. you don't pull this shit at Stanford U, whereas at McGill I'm sure the engineering students still party in fake dreadlocks and chief headdresses); and according to the blogger:

[Stanford] hosts the largest student run powwow in the nation for 39 years running, that is home to nearly 300 Native students, that has one of the strongest college Native communities in California

I've been suckered in, as usual, by the comments. A lot of the debate has devolved into whether it was okay to post the pic of the girls, mostly because the guy who took the photo tricked the girls into posing for it. (Instead of just taking a candid photo, which I assume would have by-passed all this "Hey that's not nice!" business, and re-focused everyone back on the real issue: WTF!!!)

Have you guys ever been to a powwow? There's one in Kahnawake each year, but I'm such a lazy-pants I never go! I'd like to make myself go this year. I promise to leave the hand-prints at home.

The Help is now a movie! BLEHHHHHHHHHH

[Sorry for the immature title--I was tired when I wrote this.]

I used to work at a bookstore and Katheryn Stockett's The Help was a bestseller or "hot read" for a long, long time. I picked it up, saw it was about African-American servants being helped by a white woman, written by a white woman, and never picked it up again. Now it's been made into a movie so the sales are going to spike yet again. Mehhhh.




Here's why I won't read the book.

It's not just because she's white. I do think white people can write about people of color (POC) because...
(a) most of us have people of color in our reality and we should reflect that;
(b) since reality hasn't been reflected historically, why not balance things out and have even more people of color in our books than might be in our reality?
(c) I totally don't write about my reality (vomit);
(d) among white people who are published (not moi), they should be making the environment more POC-friendly, so that POC authors and by extension POC characters are more likely to become mainstream. Because right now the belief is if there's a POC on the cover, a white person won't be interested in the book...well... unless he's an Injun from the Hunk tribe.

 (One of these Lakota is not like the other...)

Maybe an established white author, who's always had white protagonists, can "get away with" an African-American heroine--so she should try! She might even, like Justine Labalestier, manage to prevent her publisher from whitewashing her cover.

But if a white person is going to write about les peoples of color, they've got a responsibility to put in WORK. As one of the commenters said on this very good blog about race*:

SF writers often commit themselves to exhaustive research on the physics of space travel or time paradoxes, historical fiction writers pore over historical documents about the chose period in time, why should writing about a culture and a people unfamiliar to you not warrant the same amount of research? It’s like Tolkein creating several functioning languages with staggering attention to morphology, phonology, syntax, etc.; and yet seeing no problem with dehumanizing the faceless, evil masses of the East in contrast to his noble “Men of the West.” 

Judging by the next quote, sounds like Stockett had just reached Racism 101 and was so excited she had to write a book about it: [she said in interview]

"Frankly, I didn't even question the situation down there [in Mississippi]. It was just life, and I figured that's how the whole world lived. It wasn't until I was about 30 years old that I started looking back on it."

But instead of writing about a white protagonist who makes the journey she has, she wrote about a Nice White Lady who returns to her hometown all politically conscious and modern (yes, like the heroines of the historical romances we read, except this isn't a romance novel) and frees the voices of the black maids by writing down their stories.

That's the problem I have with this book, without even reading it.

The theme of the book is about giving a voice to those who are don't have a voice. About giving power to those who don't have power. And it's a white woman who does it. Whereas we know, it is an historical fact of the civil rights movement, that African-Americans TOOK that power themselves, from reluctant and/or hostile hands, by marching/fighting/protesting/being beaten/mauled by dogs/hosed/imprisoned/bombed/threatened/tortured and by telling their OWN F***ING STORIES.

The symbolism here is just too awful. White woman as spokeperson for mute black women.

Could these stories not have been told to a black woman? It's not like there weren't university educated black people in the 1960s. I'm researching the 1919s right now and there were African-Americans, women too, in the south, attending university then--you'd be surprised. Why is a white woman necessary to tell this story, other than to make this book accessible to white people?

Fail. Fail fail fail. FAIL! Baby cheeses, that is fail.

Let us turn again to the aforementioned blog:

...while The Help is about people who risk their lives to challenge the status quo of their day, the book itself does very little to challenge the status quo of its own day. A particular norm of today that The Help fails to challenge, and instead reinforces, is the tendency of white consumers to favor racially themed entertainment that makes them feel good about the victims of white supremacy, and about the few good white people who resisted it. Ultimately, such entertainment -- from Driving Miss Daisy and The Shawkshank Redemption to Gran Torino and The Blind Side, and many, many more -- also makes white audience members feel good about themselves, which they do when they distinguish themselves from the bad, racist white characters, and when they feel good about the connections that they imagine they’re making with the noble, forgiving, goodhearted characters of color. 

Yes, let us think about That Racism That Existed In That Evil South (there was no racism in the North in those days, no, or Canada, or Britain, or Australia, or anywhere twang-free) and be glad we live in a time when... well... ahem... cough cough... most white people only buy books about white protagonists. (Except when Oprah touts them, thank heaven for her. Seriously. A lot of Toni Morrison sold in North America because of her.)

So here's my thing. If I'm going to buy a book by a white author about POC I'm going to vet it carefully. Otherwise, if I'm buying a book about an African character, I look for an author from that country, and preferably a person of color. If I'm looking for a novel that takes place in India, I prefer an Indian author, preferably still a patriot, though that's harder to find. And books about African-Americans by African-American authors, etc.

This is for two very good reasons:

#1 Very Good Reason: I am going to get a more accurate representation of that culture.

#2 Very Good Reason: It supports POC writers, which shows publishers (and in the case of movies, producers) that the public IS interested in stories by POC thereby encouraging them to publish MORE stories by people of color in the future. Which is why, given two equally good books about, say, black maids in Mississippi, I should still buy the one written by an African-American author. Bahhhh I'd even buy the one by the black woman if it was "less good." But since I've got the likes of women like Toni Morrison on my bookshelf, this really isn't a worry.

I was going to post a list of recommends, but it's getting too long I muuuust sleeeeep. So latah.

ZOMGs it's hard to write a serious post when the final dance scene of Staying Alive is on. If racism is now ruining your day, watch this:

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* No longer updated, but macon leaves it up so people can still read it, and the comments. Very much worth your time.