They say that America was built on stolen land and there’s a study that proved it right, but I’d say that all of the Americas are built on stolen land. This is due to the strong legacy of colonisation through taking land and immigration, to the point of displacing native people off their lands in many if not all cases. There are still Western hemisphere countries that have substantial indigenous populations, but others are gone, displaced and marginalised or sent to live in other countries.
It is possible to colonise a place without displacing the original people that much, but in the case with the Americas the original peoples were seriously displaced. There were even attempts to wipe them out, in one case it was rather successful in one part of Canada. Then we have harrowing stories of children sent to boarding schools to become more Westernised, though tainted by abuse and death. The last Indian residential school closed in 1996.
That would be some 26 years ago, which’s in living memory. I suspect there are still some people scarred by this experience, that’s if they went to such schools almost 30 years ago. Then we have people who were socialised not to speak their native languages, while not unique to them, this is damaging to the cultures they were brought up in. There are efforts to revitalise such languages, though who knows if they’ll ever be revived fully.
Mexico still has a substantial number of indigenous language speakers, but nowhere as big as it was due to Spanish colonial influence. The same can be said of almost any American country with a substantial number of indigenous people there. While non-native people revel in the trappings of indigenous cultures, people part of those cultures don’t get much credit and suffer from further marginalisation. They might as well not exist in the current day in the popular imagination, even if they still do in real life.
There goes the problem with cultural appropriation on behalf of marginalised groups, that’s where the majority ethnicity takes on the trappings of those cultures they’ve conquered without actually respecting them. Their immersion’s rather superficial, it would like wearing Chinese foods without bothering to respect Chinese people whenever you insult them. No interest in bothering to go to Chinese language websites when one wants to know more about what Chinese attitudes are actually like.
That’s probably how indigenous people feel if their cultures get appropriated, almost nobody really listens to their cries and it hurts. That’s why it’s important to respect them, well any ethnicity if you’re that into them.
fynm 