Cultural Appropriation: It is not your story to tell and profit from.
Cultural appropriation is such a difficult topic to unpack and explain. The reason for this is that, it is complicated. There is no simple answer to this work. But what I would like people to understand is that when the dominant culture takes elements from a marginalized group and uses it as they please without knowledge, understanding, and respect, and then not caring about how their actions affect the marginalized group, this is for me is the definition of cultural appropriation.
I am by no means the first person to speak of this and address it in lecturers or presentations. There have been many colleagues of mine who have written about how to look for authentic resources and even the First Nations Education Steering Committee has set it up so that educators can pick from their book lists of authentic resources. Today with so many amazing Indigenous authors telling stories, there really is no reason why you aren’t using Indigenous voices in your classroom.
Throughout my journey as an educator in the school districts and now as a Faculty Lecturer at Simon Fraser University and presenter of Indigenous education, it never fails that I have to address cultural appropriation within my talks. A book in circulation today from the publisher Strong Nations called The Six Cedar Trees, is for me the perfect example of cultural appropriation. There are many educators out there at this point that have done their homework and removed this harmful book from their classrooms but sadly it is still in classrooms today being used as the Indigenous Education work. I want to point out that this book is being used as Indigenous education and checking off the box for educators when thinking they have done their work for Indigenous education in their classrooms. Educators believe that using this book connects to Indigenous peoples, Indigenous traditions and culture. This is a problem, this book is written by a non-Indigenous person. I will guide you through that as we unpack this book.
The push back that I get when teachers are angry with me when I tell them that The Six Cedars book is cultural appropriation is, well the artist that did the art work on the book is Indigenous. Let’s be really clear about this issue, putting Indigenous artwork on a book, does not make the author of the book Indigenous. The artist put their work on the book but they did not write the book. The person who wrote this book is a white settler educator looking through the lens of white colonial society as well as through the lens of the western colonial education system. This is why so many white educators love this book because it was written for them, from someone like them.
The other push back I get is, well it says that the book was vetted by community. Vetted is different than written with community. Vetted means it happened after the fact. If this book was written with or alongside community members supporting the understanding of this work, then that would be a different story. It would be in consultation with community. This was not the case. Also this white, non-Indigenous educator used an Indigenous language within the book that was not hers to use. Indigenous languages are endangered languages because of the settler colonial government making it illegal for Indigenous people to speak their languages in public and in Indian Residential schools. Because of these laws Indigenous communities are struggling to keep their languages and cultures alive. This settler educator is taking it upon herself to use a language that was taken from community and sell it for profit. It is not hers to use or sell.
Let's take a deeper look at how this white settler educator created this work, we can unpack what she has posted on her blog. The educator speaks of how she was dreaming up this work, she wanted to understand and fit the new core competencies within her teaching practice. She wanted to package the idea of the core competencies differently, in order to help educators, understand them. She had started at a new school that was focusing on the First People’s principles of learning. She then handed out spirit animal rocks to the staff. I would like to know if this educator knows what spirit animals are? What Indigenous group has spirit animals and would this be appropriate to paint them on rocks and give them away? Did she ask any Indigenous person if this was okay? Spirit animals are sacred in some traditions and she just pulled that piece out and used it for what she wanted to use it for, not asking the importance or cultural significance of it to the people who this is sacred to. This is appropriation. She said that the stones where an “aha” moment for her. But not the “aha” moment that I would ha