From Collector’s Weekly - read the whole article by Lisa Hix here.
This article notes how this holiday season there are many tempting options available that incorporate a “native look.”
Excerpted:
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“The problem,” says Jessica R. Metcalfe, a Turtle Mountain Chippewa and doctor of Native American studies who teaches at Arizona State University and blogs about Native American fashion designers at Beyond Buckskin, “is that they’re putting it out there as ‘This is the native,’ or ‘This is native-inspired’. So now you have non-native people representing us in mainstream culture. That, of course, gets tiring, because this has been happening since the good old days of the Hollywood Western in the 1930s and ’40s, where they hired non-native actors and dressed them up essentially in redface.
“The issue now is not only who gets to represent Native Americans,” Metcalfe says, “but also who gets to profit.”
Of course, this is not the first time Western fashion has appropriated imagery in the name of aesthetics, as fashion historian Lizzie Bramlett points out in her blog, The Vintage Traveler. For example, the pattern we think of as “paisley”—now most commonly seen on ties—was once a holy symbol of the Zoroastrians in Persia. And throughout fashion history, designers have been swiping motifs from other cultures—from China and Japan in Victorian times, Egypt in the 1920s, and West Africa and Latin America in the ’60s.
But Native Americans have a unique place in the history of the United States. Today, many Native American communities are still reeling from the impact of colonization, which started when white Europeans first invaded their homelands and continued as the colonists established a new order and repeatedly attempted to dismantle the native cultures. That this dismantling should continue at the mall can be especially disheartening.
[…]
I really encourage you all to read the article - Hix gives a pretty thorough history of Native American design appropriation and interrogates the differences between mass production of “Navajo” patterns in Urban Outfitters’ underwear as opposed to high end Native-American-inspired blankets, among other things.
