Blog for School Assignments

They don’t acknowledge it so I figured I would make a list for future reference AKA trying to make them do it

Northeastern has 11 campuses the only one that isn’t on stolen land is their London campus (home of the colonizers). I used native-land.ca do figure out whose land it actually is in most cases.

Boston: Massachusett, Nipmuck, Wampanoag

Burlington: Abenaki (Wabanaki Confederacy)

Charlotte: Catawba + Sugaree

Nahant: Naumkeag

Toronto: Haudenosaunee, Huron-Wendat, Anishinabewaki

San Francisco: Ohlone + Ramaytush

Seattle: Duwamish, Squamish, Coast Salish

Silicon Valley: Ohlone + Tamyen

I was listening to “Native Mascots, Really Still?” and something stood out to me. When talking about the people who support the football team from Washington, and it’s racist mascot and racist name, Matika said: “they’re not thinking of us as real people.” 

That reminded me of the Myths from All the Real Indians Died off, particularly in how the myths are self-serving, how the myths that settlers create then go on to benefit settlers. It disparages nation people, dehumanizes them to the point where then people think its fine to have racist mascots because they don’t know any Native people. 

A thought popped into my head that it’s part of a settler move to innocence, too. That the dehuman portrayal of Native people makes their issues less real, less important and overall just less in the eyes of the settler. Because the way the identity is portrayed affects a lot of things. Like how Muscogee nation had to spend their time trying to prove that they ran a capable reservation.

One thing that is interesting to me in regard to the “debate” over native mascots, is that when Native people are getting hurt, both mentally and physically, to the point that it leads to so many children dead because of suicide on Matika’s reservation, the reaction of the sports fans is to say ‘this isn’t hurting you.’ It makes me really upset to think that people have such a reaction, that they can’t even respond with empathy to native people, or even consider their claims of hurt to be true. 

I guess that plays back into the dehumanization of Native people through mascots. If you aren’t going to consider that native people are people, then you probably wouldn’t consider that they feel pain and that they are being hurt by these portrayals.

So it’s self-serving all over again.

I’m glad that I saw Dawnland before I listened to this episode. I think that I’ve had a profoundly different experience and interaction with the episode, because of Dawnland’s portrayal of the trauma and the bad things that native communities that have suffered because of non-compliance with ICWA.

Honestly, I don’t know much about Adoption practices, but to me, it doesn’t make much sense that Michelle wouldn’t be placed with any of the relatives that actually wanted her. I assume that it has something to do with discrimination, and whatever social worker that was assigned to her thinking that it would be better to place her into a white home with two parent-age people than for her to be emersed in her culture. 

It pisses me off so much that Lisa Blatt equated the importance of allowing native children to remain in touch with their culture, with some kind of discrimination. I can’t speak for other people, but for me, feeling un-moored in my culture is a horrible thing, and I understand that the erasure, the questioning, the isolation from the culture that would come with being adopted by a white couple, would do more harm than good. 

The fact that people think ICWA is about race is definitely a misunderstanding about how Indian sovereignty works. It reminds me of the myth that “Indians are wards of the state” because that myth, removes their sovereignty. To be honest, I hadn’t really made the connection that ICWA was about political affiliation and that it’s more of a matter of citizenship than anything else, until I listened to this podcast. But it makes sense. Other countries can probably put in place laws around international adoptions, Native nations having the same in regards to the United States makes sense. 

The title of this podcast episode has bothered me for a while, it’s part of the reason I never listened to it before now. All the other episodes start with ‘the’ ‘the treaty’ ‘the tribe’ ‘the opposition’. In all of this, “Still Bleeding” seems out of place. And the subject matter seems out of place too. To me, it seems like Rebecca Nagle was planning on having another episode here, one that was entirely reliant upon the supreme court having a decision. An episode that tackled what the decision would actually mean for the tribe, and for Indian Country. The kind of episode that I’d still really like to hear, whenever the supreme court decision ever comes out. 

But instead of that episode, we got Still Bleeding, which by itself is a really interesting episode. It’s interesting it connects the vanishing Indian, to the government process that created the myth, through the bureaucracy. “The process was meant to take our land, but it took so much more” said Rebecca Nagle.

In my final project interviews, the topic of language was brought up as something that was being lost, and while that's true, it can also be revived and revitalized. At the national day of mourning, a group of Crow citizens talked about the importance of language revitalization.

As someone who’s father never taught me his first language. I understand the loss of culture that comes with not having your language. It's like there is something missing, it makes it harder to connect with others who share the same culture, it makes it harder to connect with your relatives. It makes you feel more like an outsider, and more like maybe you don’t really belong to that culture. 

The experience of young Cherokee people not learning their language isn’t the same as not being taught Spanish. For starters, Spanish isn’t dying out. But I can reminisce over the lack of connection. 

Still Bleeding also made me think about how technology has aided in people learning languages. Nagle could practice her Cherokee by calling and talking to native Cherokee speakers, and the really popular company, Duolingo, even offers courses in ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i and Diné Bizaad.

This case has been postponed for so long, that I can say that they didn’t just run out of time like was proposed in this episode. Another calendar has been released by the supreme court between when I did my first reflection and now. The calendar goes until March 5th. There is still no sign of Sharp v. Murphy on the calendar. 

The longer this goes on, the more I’ve wondered about what the supreme court has to gain from postponing the oral arguments. It doesn’t feel like it’s such a difficult decision to make like Brown v. Board or Roe v. Wade, other cases that were reargued before the supreme court. With the evidence proposed, the Muscogee Creek Nation should have their reservation reaffirmed. 

I realized something when I was listening to the opposition article. The people who potentially have something to lose from a decision in favor of Indian Country, like the fossil fuel industry, gain more profits the longer that this decision gets put off. 

The longer that the case is put off, the longer the Muscogee nation goes without their land, which is what it seems like the supreme court wants out of this arrangement. I would hope that the argument, when it does happen, gives Muscogee the upper hand in all of this. That during their time away from the courthouse, they have managed to craft an even stronger argument as to why their reservations still exist, and that it will sway the judges into a decision that benefits Muscogee Nation and their sovereignty over their lands.

Of course, this is only a hope. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t get an announcement about Sharp v. Murphy until next June. 

The longer it goes on, I would say that I think I lose a little bit of that hope. Because it definitely feels like the judges don’t have the same opinion I do on the “cut and dry” nature of this case. 

And with the long history of native land dispossession through allotment and termination, and unfair deals that took treaty land, it just feels like this decision, might be another one. Another case of the United States ‘taking back’ land that wasn’t even theirs to begin with.  How I feel about the outcome of this case changes a lot depending on what new information I’ve gotten. Right now, what’s making me think that the court won’t reaffirm their reservation, is what Nelson said in class. That when he told the Mohegan historian about this case, that she laughed and said ‘that would never happen’. It took so much effort for the Mohegan people to get even a small amount of land, it makes sense that the federal government would do as much as they could to stop any land from returning to native people.

My town is filled with firsting and lasting. Everything about its history (a history that it’s very proud of) teaches people to relegate Native Americans to the past and celebrate the “accomplishments” of settlers. 

My town was founded in 1635. They hold a lot of pride in that incorporation. In the old historic “first period” homes that we have. There is so much relegation of native peoples to the past, even though their mark is all over the town. 

People seem to forget, with my town being “historic” that history is not something of settler origins, history did not begin with colonialism. There was history in our town for centuries before the Puritans arrive, yet the town tries to hide that fact. Walking around town you see the “first church” you see the historic sign that commemorates our town as the site of the “first jailbreak in america.” There’s a large mural that has the whole history of the town, one that has Native Americans in four places. At the beginning, before settlers arrived and the purchasing of the land that would become out town. A painted on stature of Masconomet the Sagamore of the Agawam people. A small depition in the second panel of native people killing settlers, obviously painted in the favor of the settlers. And lastly, in the last panel, where there is a (wrong) depiction of Emma Jane Mitchel Safford, the so-called “Last Indian Princess of Ipswich” (which is incorrect in a number of ways) who died in 1958, and the only northeastern native person talked about in the public schools after the 1700s. While this brings native people into the near(ish) present, it firmly leaves them out of the modern context of today’s town.

There isn’t a lot of information about the Native people of my region today. It’s one of those towns where everyone assumes that the native people aren’t there anymore, and there’s no (easily accessible) evidence to say whether or not it’s true. Even if it was true, that the native people aren’t here anymore, it still doesn’t make the settlers any more the first inhabitants of a place. 

Names that are native place names get associated with settler things. Like Annisquam being associated with a neighborhood of a city rather than a native name for a place. Or Masconomet being associated with a high school rather than the Sachem of the Agawam.

But I think the biggest danger of teaching Native history of a specific area where there aren’t really native people anymore, is that those people will go out and assume that there aren’t native people anywhere. They’ll think that the Wampanoag people are gone or the Massachusett people or the Nipmuck or any of the other tribes in the United States, are gone. When they’re not gone. They’re still here, they were first, they have outlasted settler expectations of the ‘vanishing indian’ and in many places that aren’t my hometown, they’re resisting too.

How insidious it is that they divided the lands in ways that made it easier to steal. It’s odd to think about, that those “disappearing maps” of native land in the united states, the ones that make the expansion of the United States seem inevitable, are probably due in large part to things like allotment. To using bureaucracy and the law to steal land from native people. In that way it’s kind of ironic that this case is providing an opportunity for bureaucracy to restore the land, using some of the same systems that it initially took the land. 

Because the system was designed to hurt native people. I think a lot of people (including me before I listened to This Land) don’t realize how many steps the US government actively took to disposes of native people of their land. It wasn’t that they gave it up, or that settlers just gradually outnumbered native people and so the land became under the jurisdiction of the United States, it was that things like blood quantum were put in place to allocate land, land was distributed in ways so that it was too far away to be of any proper use, and laws like squatters laws were put in place to allow settlers to more easily take native land.

The fact that the Native people had to actively fight to keep the land that they were give through allotment, while settlers didn’t have to do anything and got the land made me really upset, but it also reminded me about how Muscogee Creek nation had to be constantly arguing in court that they were fit to run a reservation while the Oklahoma government didn’t have to prove a thing about their government’s competency. 

One thing that really shocked me about this episode, is that when Nagle lays out all the facts about the case, it seems so cut and dry. It seems obvious that if the Supreme Court justices were thinking about precedent and the facts when it came to this case, it would have been voted on by now. And the decision would have been to validate the reservations of the tribes.

Throughout the making of the video, I realized that I missed a lot of opportunities to share information from the class. For example, when one of my interviewees brought up the football team from Washington, that may have been a perfect time to delve deeper into the subject of misrepresentations. Maybe share something from one of the All My Relations episodes, but because I was busy filming, and because I had already laid out the format of the videos, I let that subject go. The format of interviewing people wasn’t as conducive to unlearning as I think a conversation would have been. However, I do feel that they have learned something. I would be interested in talking to them all again in a few days, showing them the final result and asking them about how the conversation has influenced their perspectives. I hope that it did have an effect.

Because, part of the reason that I wanted to make a video rather than a paper, was so that it could keep on “paying it forward” for learning and unlearning. And it already has. Working on editing the video has given me opportunities to have more conversations with my friends about the narrative of thanksgiving, and how it should or shouldn’t be taught. They might not be recorded conversations but they’re genuine conversations. 

Things also stand out to me more after spending so much time with my interviewee's testimonies. I notice the Massachusettes flag more, I notice how people say and respond to lank acknowledgments, I pay attention to how people describe their thanksgiving, and indigenous people and feel more comfortable speaking up and spreading information on these topics. 

There are so many topics that I still don’t know that much about. Hearing everyone in class go around and describe the topics that they discussed, from science and indigenous knowledge systems to decolonization, to native mascots. 

This episode gave me the kind of history lesson I wish I had gotten in American public schools. Nagle is a storyteller, and a good one. She tells a complex history, one that had many bad sides depending on the angles that you’re looking at, and lets you come to your conclusion. 

“My job isn’t to tell you how to feel one way or another about our history. I just want people to have all the facts. Love or hate the Ridges, that's on you." That quote came from the Cherokee historian Nagle talked to. I liked that. 

There was so much in this episode that the first time I listened to this, I didn’t know. But this time around, I couldn’t shake the question, especially after my last two reflections: “Do the supreme court judges know all this?”

John Ridge, as a lawyer, “us[ing] his white education to fight from within” reminded me of the current lawyers, the ones who are giving the oral arguments in the favor of Muscogee nations. They’ve adapted to the times and are trying to use the current system in order to get their land back, just like John Ridge tried to use his system to keep their land or their sovereignty. 

Ridges’ history about his upbringing also made me wonder about that first Indian boarding school. It was mentioned very offhandedly by Nagle, in a way that didn’t seem to carry the horror that they have been explained within media that we’ve seen before. To me, it seemed like she framed it as a good thing, someplace where he met his wife and got the education to fight the settlers, and eventually sign away their land with the Treaty of New Echota. 

Over the past few episodes, I’ve been wondering something, but it really came up when Nagle quoted/paraphrased Adrinnee Keene: "settlers gave colonization stories And indigenous people have creation stories...but as indigenous people, we know how this land was formed because we have been here since the beginning if time" 

Personally, I think I'm struggling to reckon the Cherokee people's connection to the land with the fact that they don’t live on their ancestral lands anymore. Nagle says that it’s there because they’ve practiced their ceremonies on it for 7 generations, but what about places where native people have been displaced from, do they still have a right to their original lands if now they have lived someplace new for a long time? The lands that the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw and Chocktaw nations now inhabit are also Osage, Oceti Sakowin, Wichita, Comanche, and Caddo lands (according to native-land.ca). Who’s land really is it?

I don't really think that's my place to judge wheater or not they have a right to the land because I'm not indigenous, but that doesn’t mean I understand.

For now, I’m going to act like It's now their land because it is according to the treaty. And that if the treaty where to be respected, then it would be theirs, and so, the treaty should be respected.

I understand that the unceded land of the United States, places. where treaties were made and broke, should be returned to the native people, but what about the places that, by the treaties of the nations or at least by people like John Ridge, were granted to the United States? Are those also lands that should be returned?  I guess it doesn’t really make sense to me, but I also get that it doesn’t have to make sense to me.

“Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder.” - Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1963, p. 36 (via Decolonization is not a metaphor pg. 4)   

Prior to reading this book, I hadn’t really approached Standing Rock from a historical perspective, and certainly not one that centered the sovereignty of the Oceti Sakowin before. It centered indigenous sovereignty from an indigenous perspective (being written, of course, by a native, sioux, person).

But I think that Nick Estes did a very good job recontextualizing historic events that I had heard about from settler perspectives and relating them to the continued fight for indigenous sovereignty that brought us to the events of the #NoDAPL movement. 

Old Wars

It recontextualized things like the “American Indian Wars.” According to Wikipedia’s “list of wars involving the United States”  there were 4 wars between the various Oceti Sakowin tribes and the United States; The Dakota War of 1862,  the Colorado War (1863-65), the Powder River War (1965) and Red Cloud’s War (1866-68) which led to the creation of the Treaty of Fort Laramine, which much of the book is based around. There were also 2 other wars after the treaty was signed: the Great Sioux War of 1876 (which seized the black hills that were given in the treaty), the Pine Ridge Campaign (which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee). In reading Estes's account of these events, I realized that the way that these wars are taught in my childhood history classes, was as if there weren’t real wars. They were not portrayed as sovereign nations resisting encroachment onto their territories by the United States. I mean, they were barely taught at all, because history class preferred to focus on the Civil War that was happening at the same time. 

When I was in Chicago at the cultural center, there was a sign that said: “The Civil War was also a settler colonial war.” This made sense to me in some way, because it was a war over land that belonged to neither group that was trying to claim it. The Indian Wars and the Civil War were both, as the sign said: “each part of the westward advance of the United States empire and the colonization of the west. The Civil War...was also a conflict over the way the United States empire would develop.” That sign, plus the realization that the dates of the American Indian Wars overlap almost completely with the Civil War made me realize just how wrong the United State’s history is taught. 

The history of the Oceti Sakowin - their origins to now - isn’t included in the curriculum. The United States gets to act like their expansion was inevitable, and ignore the historic wars that were waged against sovereign nations in a conquest for more land and resources. And ignore the modern war with the continued occupation of lands, breaking of treaties, and denial of modern sovereignty.  By simply thinking of the Oceti Sakowin Oyate/Great Sioux Nation as a nation it directly challenges the notion that it was inevitable. It recontextualizes the history and the supposed ‘greatness’ of the United States by proving that it is a nation built upon the destruction of other nations.

Ghost Dancers

Another thing that stuck with me from the book was the Ghost Dance. Settler history doesn’t portray it in the same way as Estes does. Its generally refered to as some kind of ‘crazy indian thing’ on par with the Dancing Plague of 1518 because of its mischaracterization by anthropologists. What isn’t mentioned is how much it makes sense in the true context of its time period. Estes calls it “an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles” and recontextualizes it as a true anti-colonial resistance movement, one that went against the US ‘concentration camp’ reservations, boarding schools, and the movement towards assimilation. A movement that posed a threat to US imposition of their sovereignty over the Oceti Sakowin, and was met with military force and violence. 

The title of the book, our history is the future was confusing to me at first, but the explanation of the ghost dance actually helped me to understand it. Estes description of the ghost dance as being “transported to a forthcoming world where the old ways and dead relatives lived” in contrast to the “horrors of their current reality” and that it offered “a reminder that life need not always be this way” to its participants, I was able to better understand (Estes 124). The idea of looking to our past in order to envision a future that is better than our current present makes sense. I think it’s a bit like envisioning the future that you want as the first step to making it a reality, like in Decolonization is not a metaphor, decolonization must first stop being a metaphor in order for “the very possibility of decolonization” to be real (Tuck & Yang 4). 

And similarly, I think, Standing Rock offered a similar window into the past and the future. Estes recounts Ladonna BraveBull Allard’s story from the Sacred Stone camp, seeing everyone working, roasting deer meat, kids playing, and people telling stories. “They were all speaking Dakota. I looked at them and I thought, ‘this is how we are supposed to live. This makes sense to me.’ Every day...I saw our culture and our way of life come alive.” (BraveBull Allard, via Estes pg 51-52)

Continued Resistance

There are so many “Standing Rocks” that have happened over and over again throughout Octei Sakowin history as their land has been taken, and dams have flooded their towns, their land, as police killed their people, and there has been resistance to all of these. Yet from my perspective, settlers see Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline as different from all these other events that the tribes didn’t want. 

But what really makes it different? Is it because there were other people involved? Because there were non-Sioux and non-native people who stood with them? What makes one act of resistance more important than another? Because all these acts of resistance are important to be recognized. “This Battle for native sovereignty had already been fought many times before, and that, even after the encampment was gone, their anti-colonial struggle would continue.” (From inside cover, Our History is the Future)

When I was considering those questions,  a quote came to mind from Pualani Case, a Native Hawaiian who is a leader of the Protect Mauna Kea movement to stop TMT. 

“When the Native people of a place say, ‘not this time’ ‘no more’ ‘you have taken almost everything we have, and if we allow you to build on the most sacred’ without attempting to stop that, we may as just lay down, as a native people and say ‘take everything’ if you take the most sacred what will we have left.” 

-Pualani Case, Source

When I first heard this quote, it made me uncomfortable, because I thought, ‘just because someone takes one thing doesn’t mean they should take all of it, but when I rewatched the video for the third-ish time, and after I read Estes’ book, I think I understand it better. That quote isn’t about the settlers taking the land, it's about the importance for the native people to defend the land, to try to stop settler imposition and construction on the land. Some of what makes them still have a right to the land are because they have never stopped fighting for it in one way or another. 

Chicago Cultural Center is built on land that “consists of both territory ceded through treaties that the U.S. government coerced Indigenous people to sign and unceded territory created by landfill after those coerced treaties were signed.” (Decolonizing the Chicago Cultural Center, pg 20 ) Many other places in the united states are built like that, Boston is like that. But coerced treaties and made land doesn’t separate Native people from the land, it’s still theirs and they are still of the land.

And therefore, every act of resistance, every existence as resistance, is important, even if some are more important because they deal with the most sacred, and the most important things, like the water, and the right to live. 

Modern Sovereignty

“Internationalism” was another concept from Our History is the Future that I thought was super interesting and recontextualizing. Because if you consider all the tribes to be their own nations that retain their sovereignty, then gatherings like the sacred stone camps at standing rock, organizations like the American Indian Movement, are international movements. And interactions between the United States and native nations are nation-to-nation, they are international relations, or at least, maybe they should be considered international relations.

A lot of my thoughts on this book are still scattered, even after the weeks that I’ve spent processing and connecting it to my interactions in my daily life. But there’s one paragraph that I really like that I think does a good job, a better job, of relating all these things I talked about down. 

“The Ghost Dance was not a monolithic movement, but  an accumulation of prior anti-colonial experiences, sentiments, and struggles that informed #NoDAPL. Each struggle had adopted essential features of previous traditions of Indigenous resistance, while creating new tactics and visions to address the present reality, and, consequentially, projected Indigenous liberation into the future. Trauma played a major role. But if we oversimplify Indigenous peoples as perpetually wounded, we cannot understand how they formed kinship bonds and constantly recreated and kept intact families, communities, and governance structures while surviving as fugitives and prisoners of a settler state and as conspirators against empire; how they loved, cried, laughed, imagined, dreamed, and defended themselves; or how they remain, to this day, the first sovereigns of this land and the oldest political authority.”

 I talked about the biases of the judges last time, and I felt like this episode really hammered home that they do have biases. They have biases about what Native people look like, about what reservations look like, about how effective their governments are.

One thing that I thought was interesting was the dichotomy between Oklahoma and Muscogee nation in the oral arguments. “Oklahoma didn’t spend any of its time explaining that its government functions” said Rebecca Nagle. This made me think about how the myths are self serving. How the myths about what Reservations are like, what tribal governments are like, make it harder for native nations to assert their sovereignty, it makes it harder for native people in the court system, and it makes it easier for settlers to get the decisions they want.

Additionally, there was a lot of settler fear that the opposition was preying on in their defense. Specifically, the fear about what happens after the land gets returned. This was touched on a bit in Decolonization is not a Metaphor; 

"reconciliation, which motivate settler moves to innocence ...is concerned with questions of what will decolonization look like? What will happen after abolition? What will be the consequences of decolonization for the settler?... these questions need not, and perhaps cannot, be answered in order for decolonization to exist”

-Tuck and Yang, Decolonization is Not a Metaphor. 

While recognizing that half of Oklahoma is still reservation territory is not the same thing as decolonization, the act of re-establishing the sovereignty of native people over their land seems to metaphorically unsettle settlers, even though these fears are unfounded. 

Because the tribes, even with the restoration of their land, can’t make non-native people do much. And in that I think is this deeper set bias within the judges, that it would be bad for native people to have jurisdiction over non-native people, even though it’s creating such issues, especially with the epidemic of assaulted, missing and murdered native women.  Somewhere in there it feels like the potential threat to Oklahoma’s state taxes or the confusion that may arise from the reservation being reaffirmed, is more important than the treaty rights of indigenous people. And I hate that.

The role of the fossil fuel companies in the court case wasn’t focused on too much, but I found it very concerning. I wonder what the outcome actually would be for the fossil fuel companies if the land they were drilling on became under the jurisdiction of the reservation? Would the tribe even be able to do anything to stop fracking?

 I had heard a lot of these concepts surrounding Native Appropriations before. Ones that I feel are important, but I appreciated having them laid out and connected to other important topics. The idea of power as being a key important part of appropriating other cultures is something that I’ve heard before, but less so have I concretely connected it to settler colonialism.

I connected it better when Adrienne read a quote from Ijeoma Oluo

When well-meaning white people say, “Help me define cultural appropriation so I know what to do and not to do,” what they are actually saying, even if they aren’t aware, is, “Help me understand how to continue in this system of privilege and oppression without feeling bad.”

-Ijeoma Oluo: When We’re Talking about Cultural Appropriation We’re Missing the Point

To me this connected cultural appropriation and the power dynamics of settler colonialism to “settler moves to innocence” from Decolonization is Not A Metaphor. It’s a way for settlers trying to rid themselves of settler guilt, without actually putting in any work to help native people. Allowing issues that affect Native people to persist without being effected, something that native people don’t have the privilege to do.

Something that I thought connected this well to Episode 3: Native Mascots, Really Still? and More Than A Word was that when talking about Native Appropriations in native communities, Adrienne was met with the response of “Why does this matter.” I think there was a similar response portrayed in the issue around Native sports mascots. Where people wanted to address the “real issues” that were faced by native communities: the issues that were life-threatening or bigger issues. Just like in the mascot issue, the issue of Native Appropriations is very tied to the big issues.

I thought that one connection that was made was particularly insightful to me. The appropriation of native cultures and “playing Indian” for Halloween costumes led to the sexualization of those costumes, and the sexualization of Native women that is contributing to the high violence, sexual assault and epidemic of missing and murdered native women. Its kind of shocking that something that settlers do so thoughtlessly has such withstanding impacts.

People ask why Native Appropriations matter and the above example is a good reason. But I also think that it doesn’t have to be that big. It doesn’t have to directly be contributing to native people's deaths to be harmful and bad, and something that shouldn’t be done. Because taking culture, ignoring protocol around sacred things, stealing, is bad even if it wasn’t a part of the larger settler-colonial structure.