I am a huge language geek. As in, I’m a little obsessed with language and how it relates to culture, to identity, to understanding the world around you. If you speak another language, or have even tried to learn another language, you realize pretty early on that although you might be using a comparable term…
Category: Pan-Indian
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…
You’re Métis? So which of your parents is an Indian?
In a previous post, I described what it is like as an Alberta Métis to come to Quebec and realise that ‘Métis’ does not mean the same thing here. I’m not a shut-in…I realised that there were different definitions out there, I simply hadn’t lived where I was defined by them before. In another post,…
Images that make you go hmmmm.
Every once in a while I come across an image in my daily life that has an immediate impact on me. (You’ve already had my opinion on ‘native-themed’ costumes.) First comes the flood of feelings. Annoyance, frustration, confusion. Then I look at the image again and try to understand what the image is meant to…