I have so much state pride that I’m embarrassed to post this, but after the panel last week, I think it’s really telling.
This photo- making fun of regional stereotypes in my home state – has been shared 1,613 times on facebook in the past 24 hours. A few of my friends had posted it and when I opened it and saw the “Drunk Indians” category I immediately cringed. Prior to watching Reel Injun and listening to the panel of American Indian students in class, I was naïve to how pervasive these offensive stereotypes really are. Before last week’s class, I honestly don’t know if the “Drunk Indians” category on this map would have even caught by attention. However, after listening to the plight of Amanda, Tessa, Simon, and Lance, I feel much more in tune to the discrimination and racism that they face and this map simply serves as yet another example of the fight they’re up against.
So many thoughts ran through my head as I listened to them speak: guilt for being naïve enough to link American Indians to casinos and large college scholarships; sympathy for the plight of their people and the additional pressure that they as young people face to keep their blood-line alive; and also a bit of jealousy for the pride they have in their heritage when I feel very little for my own. Although a short 90 minutes, the panel left a very deep impression.
With Stephanie's permission, I shared her blog post with our Native American panelists from the last class and here is the response from Tessa McLean:
ReplyDelete"Wow, that photo is a disgrace. I think that area of the 'Drunk Indians' on the map is Red Lake, an Ojibwe reservation, those are my People, the Anishinaabe.
I admit we do have drunk Indians but I know who and what caused them to drink... It was and is to this day: boarding schools/residential schools, nuns and priests who raped them, their land being stolen from them, their children ripped from their arms, their memory being cut from them in the form of a hair braid, the beatings and the whippings of a leather belt, broken treaties, all the love they had changed into pain and it lead to a bottle. This historical trauma passed onto other generations and the nasty cycle continues with a bottle. No one takes the time to understand why an Indian drinks. I spent time learning those painful stories and I will defend a drunk Indian because I know their story, I understand it and I feel it everyday.
Anyways, I have met more non-native closet drunks and no one ever talks about them or makes maps of them. I wonder what the story of closet drunks is, the rum was yummy?
Thank you for sharing this blog of your student. I am glad their view is changing."
Tessa
I think that Professor Thompson makes a good point! I think that it is so unfair to label the demographic region "drunk indians" for the reason that yes, it may be true, but by that same logic, you could stereotype Texas as "drunk rednecks" and Colorado as "stoned hippies" and Arizona and Southern California as "Illegal immigrants," but that doesn't make it necessarily true. There are drunks everywhere, and immigrants everywhere and rednecks and hippies just the same. I believe that this sort of over generalization is ignorance in it's pure form, and is something that holds us back as a country, and even as a species. I had the chance to talk with some of my ignorant undergrad peers and they seem to argue that anti immigration and their non supportive attitude towards american indians is just nationalism.
ReplyDeleteThis horrified me. But it made me realize something. It may be true. But if that is the case, then it seems nationalism teaches people to hate other people that they've never met and take pride in accomplishments they had absolutely not part in. People in America will say things like, "F*&# the French, if we hadn't of saved their asses in WWI and II they would be speaking German right now!" Well it seems, at least in college, that people will mistake blacking out after a shot of Jager, and going through the McDonalds drive-thru at 3 in the morning and sitting on the couch all day getting hammered, with signing national peace treaties and loosing their friends in battle in Versi and living through the tramas of war. If this is the way kids, as well as adults, feel is a justified sense of national pride, then I believe the stereotypes should be more focused on the American Public as it really is, ignorant and arrogant.
So the next time some one makes a map of world in terms of demographics, they should generalize the USA as a bunch of ignorant douchebags that that think like babies. And although people may be upset because that sort of generalization doesn't describe EVERYONE, well then they should think twice about make maps like the one above.