It's All Performance Art 53

Where the term cultural appropriation loses its cachet is that it's primarily angry, emotional and reactive.  It is the angry and bitter fruit of collective and intergenerational trauma from decades, from centuries of mistreatment, discrimination, abuse, forced assimilation.  Notice that I am not using the word genocide.   I still don't know if it is an appropriate word to use in this context and it isn't my job to argue for or against the application of the word genocide to the sad, tragic and completely horrific treatment that our own First Nations peoples have suffered at the hands of those who came over here centuries ago, as well as the equally or even more horrific treatment of indigenous peoples everywhere in the world that has been colonized.  Well, if that isn't genocide, then it still comes pretty darn close to being genocide. 

It can be very difficult having a rational dialogue with trauma survivors.  I know something about this, being myself a survivor of trauma.   The indigenous  peoples are also struggling to preserve and revitalize their cultures, in many cases all but destroyed by the colonizers. The anger is unarguably justified, but when anger and rage are clouding the conversation, then all that can be done is to find ways of reducing and ameliorating the pain.  Basic harm-reduction.     I can't really contribute or comment on the conversation, because it isn't my conversation, being neither First Nations, nor a privileged white person.  I am racially caucasian, but I have been poor and marginalized all my life, so all I can do is listen, observe and learn. 

Which also means expecting that my own assumptions are going to be questioned and challenged and perhaps or hopefully changed.  I do cringe when I see the way aboriginal art is often appropriated by non aboriginals, and I especially get annoyed when certain progressive Anglican priests wear local coastal First Nations symbols on their liturgical garments.  It still seems at best patronizing, at worse insulting to the essential meaning and purpose of these symbols. 

By the same token, I remember back in the late eighties remarking to a young individual involved in rather nefarious spiritual practices who had a little cross dangling from his earring, "What is a neopagan like you doing with such a nice symbol hanging from his ear?" I playfully asked him one day.   He just about shat himself as he was saying "How did you know, how did you even guess?"  But I did discern that that's what he was doing in his spare time.  How I discerned it would be open to opinion and interpretation, but given that I was spending time in the cafe where he worked under the auspices of  the Christian street ministry I was then involved with, then perhaps God might have revealed to me something about this young lad's spiritual vocation.   An occupational necessity, methinks.

Of course, appropriation happens all the time, is unavoidable, and really we had might as well live with it.  Perhaps try to minimize the offence where we can, but people are always going to find something to be offended about.  For some of us, well, we seem to thrive on it, though I don't think it's particularly good for my skin.