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…
Category: Culture
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…
Experiencing the digital revolution with my moccasins on.
Some people in the NDN tumblr community have coined a new meaning for the acronym NATO. Forget the imperialism, there is no room for that in the new NATO. Now it means Native Americans Take Over. There are a lot of concepts this acronym can stand for, but right now it makes me think about…
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…
A rose by any other name is a mihkokwaniy.
It is always eye-opening to go outside the comfortable confines of this blog and read what questions (or assertions) people are releasing into the ether. As frustrating (and sometimes hilarious) as it can be to surf around, reading these questions and assertions, it does help to clarify for me the kinds of information that people…