From: davidf@golem.waterloo.on.ca (David J. Fiander)
Subject: Re: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 16:05:36 GMT

According to Crawford_Kilian@mindlink.bc.ca (Crawford Kilian):
>
>Getting beyond that to her basic question, "cultural appropriation" has
>become a noisy issue here in Canada--especially in connection with white
>writers portraying native Indians or members of other ethnic groups. As a

The canonical example of cultural appropriation in Canada (even
though he's not dead yet) is W. P. Kinsella.  He has written
several stories about a fictional tribe of native americans
(Indian, not Inuit) called the Hobbema.  For the most part the
stories are light hearted, and have been accused of
trivialising the plight of the aboriginals.  One of the
stories, entitled "Being Invisible" (or something), however
light, affected me greatly -- it is about an illiterate man who
signs up for adult literacy (for some highly trivial reason),
but learns to read, and realises the power that the ability to
read confers on those that have it.

From Crawford's comments about "clonism", it seems that he is
quite aware of what the most strident voices mean by cultural
appropriation, but then he goes on to say:

>About 20 years ago, an Inuk named Markoosie appropriated the form of the
>English-language novel and wrote a superb novel called Harpoon of the Hunter;
>it brought Inuit life and values alive in my imagination and the minds of
>many other readers. About 2 years ago, another Inuk--a teenage girl in
>Iqaluit, on Baffin Island--posted a story about her family in an online
>writing course I was teaching. The story created the cyberspace equivalent of
>an earthquake, startling and delighting everyone who read it.
>
>By the same token, if I were to master the technique of Inuit carving, and I
>was really good at it, I would be contributing to an artistic genre and in
>turn enriching every other carver. If I was lousy at it, my work would

In these paragraphs I think that Crawford is to some extent
missing the point of those complaining about cultural
appropriation.  Nobody is complaining about the
"appropriation", or use, of other cultural _forms_ of
expression (plenty of caucasians write Haiku, for example), but
the use of "voice"; one can only write stories in or about the
cultural milieu in which one was raised.

I too have problems with complaints about cultural
appropriation, especially when groups are pressuring the
government to withdraw grants from authors who are stretching
themselves, and attempting to tell "other peoples" stories.
However, I also see that authors that do not properly research
the background of a people about whom they will be writing can
damage that culture.  If the only exposure that many Canadians
have to treaty indians is through the news media and Kinsella's
stories, then they will have a different feeling for the
problems that natives face than if they had read works about
the native situation which were written by natives, or by more
thoughtful authors.

But then again, if a treay native had written the Hobbema
Indian stories, nobody would be complaining, and the basis of
my thesis above would have been totally shot to hell.

Some days I'm wishy and some days I'm washy.

- David

PS.
Crawford, you were the quote du jour at the top of the Op-Ed
page of the Kitchener-Waterloo Record one day this week (if
you really care) - D
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