Step 1: Go to Museum. Step 2: Have deep thoughts. Step 3...
This is collected from a Twitter thread I put down yesterday.
I spent a chunk of yesterday at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. First... I thought using the term 'indian' to describe indigenous Americans went the way of the dodo about 2 years ago. What is up with that?
Anyway, their Transformer exhibit was interesting. It was a collection of art installations that essentially tried to remind people that indigenous cultures are just as modern as every other culture. Some of the art installations were a bit pretentious, and some were chilling.
I was taken most by the Taino exhibit. Genetically, I'm (mostly) half Puerto Rican, but my own cultural identity has been shaped by a childhood rife with rejections of every ethnic culture I could belong to.
I eventually fell into what is now called 'Nerd Culture', which knows no national or ethnic descriptors. But I digress; the Taino exhibit.
What struck me hardest was the overbearing erasure that has occurred. It's staggering.
Historically speaking, there is no actual Taino culture; this is the term given by Europeans to South American and Caribbean indigenous cultures that spoke Arawak. Since the individual nations have been completely overwritten descendants have now rallied behind the term and claimed it as their own. This includes Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians. While there's a relatively rich history of Continental US indigenous nations and cultures preserved, the footprints of whom we call Taino have been nearly wiped clean from history. Between intermixing with their conquerors, and later the African slaves brought to work on Caribbean plantations, there is barely anything left that can be recognized from the individual cultures that comprise the Taino. Even the names of the tribes have been forgotten, because indigenous traditions were told orally, and no one else thought enough to preserve them in writing. And if that's not enough, at the turn of the century, ruling governments declared the indigenous peoples extinct. Further still, there are movements that claim Taino cannot exist now because of too much intermixing. That last bit really is galling.
All of this hit me hard, as I've had to redefine my own culture because other people decided I didn't belong in their culture, and I wasn't smart enough to refute that. Couple that with the growing movement for ethnic representation in pop-culture, and I find myself having something of an identity crisis, years after i thought I had made myself comfortable with who and what I was. Erasure, representation, it matters on every scale imaginable.
I spent a chunk of yesterday at the Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian. First... I thought using the term 'indian' to describe indigenous Americans went the way of the dodo about 2 years ago. What is up with that?
Anyway, their Transformer exhibit was interesting. It was a collection of art installations that essentially tried to remind people that indigenous cultures are just as modern as every other culture. Some of the art installations were a bit pretentious, and some were chilling.
I was taken most by the Taino exhibit. Genetically, I'm (mostly) half Puerto Rican, but my own cultural identity has been shaped by a childhood rife with rejections of every ethnic culture I could belong to.
I eventually fell into what is now called 'Nerd Culture', which knows no national or ethnic descriptors. But I digress; the Taino exhibit.
What struck me hardest was the overbearing erasure that has occurred. It's staggering.
Historically speaking, there is no actual Taino culture; this is the term given by Europeans to South American and Caribbean indigenous cultures that spoke Arawak. Since the individual nations have been completely overwritten descendants have now rallied behind the term and claimed it as their own. This includes Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians. While there's a relatively rich history of Continental US indigenous nations and cultures preserved, the footprints of whom we call Taino have been nearly wiped clean from history. Between intermixing with their conquerors, and later the African slaves brought to work on Caribbean plantations, there is barely anything left that can be recognized from the individual cultures that comprise the Taino. Even the names of the tribes have been forgotten, because indigenous traditions were told orally, and no one else thought enough to preserve them in writing. And if that's not enough, at the turn of the century, ruling governments declared the indigenous peoples extinct. Further still, there are movements that claim Taino cannot exist now because of too much intermixing. That last bit really is galling.
All of this hit me hard, as I've had to redefine my own culture because other people decided I didn't belong in their culture, and I wasn't smart enough to refute that. Couple that with the growing movement for ethnic representation in pop-culture, and I find myself having something of an identity crisis, years after i thought I had made myself comfortable with who and what I was. Erasure, representation, it matters on every scale imaginable.