Back in March of this year, I came across an online store called Ruby Love Joy. Based in Australia, this site featured (as you can see in this picture) a lot of men and women in face paint and “warrior inspired” headdresses. You will likely recognise a number of the pictures as they’ve been featured…
Category: Cultural appropriation
Icewine, Roquefort cheese and the Navajo Nation.
I’d like to tell you a story about icewine. Icewine is pressed from grapes that freeze on the vine, and is an incredibly sweet and expensive dessert wine. Not everyone likes it, but I consider it a pretty decadent treat. Canada is the largest producer of authentic icewine in the world because unlike many other…
Check the tag on that “Indian” story.
Stories and sayings attributed to Native Americans have been floating around probably since settlers stopped spending all of their time and energy on not dying. I am not entirely certain why stories that never originated in any indigenous nation are passed around as “Native American Legends”, but listener beware. You’ve probably seen this one at…
The do’s, don’ts, maybes, and I-don’t-knows of cultural appropriation.
Cultural appropriation is a seriously hot-button topic. It ranges from the aggressively entitled stance of, “I can do whatever I want!” to the perpetually angry approach of “everything is cultural appropriation!”. Of course, the former is a much larger portion of the debate, and the latter is almost always a huge straw-man argument that few…