A Contradiction of Cultures

Dear Philip Deloria,

It's incredibly interesting to me how Indians were simultaneously fetishized and denounced. While colonists were taking their land, they were also partaking in the appropriation of stereotyped aspects of Indian culture. Examples of this are apparent in your book-- Mayday festivities and the tendency to dress up "like an Indian," to name a few out of many. Colonists took part in a contradiction that persists worldwide nowadays, that of both desiring and being repulsed by a culture. This has surfaced recently in debates regarding cultural appropriation, the phenomenon of members of a dominant culture taking aspects of an oppressed culture out of their original context to use for fun. The difference between the two cultures using it is that dominant cultures have a choice of when and what to partake in, but the oppressed have no autonomy regarding that. The events described in the book were an early form of cultural appropriation, and I hope its harms are becoming more apparent as we progress.

Uma

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