Gangleri's Grove: Pagan Blog Project: C is for Cultural Misappropriation
“…All of these things equal one thing: lack of respect.
Before latching on to someone else’s traditions (traditions that are the surviving remnant of cultures decimated, I might add, by our forebears), why don’t we instead seek out and restore our own? Every single person of European descent (every single person on the earth actually), if you go back far enough, has an indigenous tradition. Your ancestors did something other than monotheism. Your people weren’t always Christian. If you want to know what tradition you have a right to: look at where your people come from and peel back the layers of monotheistic dominance to find your people’s Gods—and for those of us who are “Mutts,” the way to go about this is to honor all of your ancestors. You’ll be pushed where you need to go. If you’re claimed by a Deity, that changes the game. You might be English and claimed by Dionysus, for instance. That means, at least as I would counsel, that you have a responsibility to learn as much about the cultural practices and traditions in which His worship evolved as possible in addition to striving to keep your signal clarity with Him clear and clean so you can discover how He wishes you to honor Him. Then of course, there is honoring your own ancestors too. That doesn’t go away. There is a way to do this well and respectfully.
Even though our ancestral ways were wiped out, I don’t think that excuses us from honoring our ancestors and striving to reconstruct our ancestral practices. That’s not something that comes from books. I don’t have any problem with people honoring whatever Gods call them, but I think that the key is going through the direction of one’s ancestors and the Gods, not feeling as though one is entitled to partake of indigenous rites and rituals simply because they are there and old…”This.
Also, I think for “mutts” it can be complicated. I am vast, vast majority European. Mostyl Ireland and Scotland. At most, I’m 1/8 Mi’kmaq, probably not that much, but the culture has been lost to my family, I’m fully white in appearance, and I have to be extremely careful looking into that culture or doing anything with it because I’m part of the oppressive/colonizing class that is still attempting to destroy Native people even if I happen to have a few ancestors who aren’t.
I do see a lot of people who say “I’m 1/64 Cherokee!” (why is it always Cherokee?) or “My Great-Grandma was an Indian princess!” (Native peoples didn’t really have princesses) to justify gross cultural misappropriation on their parts. In cases where you’re mostly white and have a bit of black/Romani/whatever in your background, trying to honor those ancestors or practice those traditions has to be done extremely carefully and with awareness of how those cultures have been distorted in our media, because it’s very easy for misinformation to turn something you think is ‘honoring’ your ancestors into a gross insult.
