A little more on cultural appropriation
I'm posting this here and nowhere else because this was the only pagan space I've seen this topic taken seriously and actually discussed and not dismissed out of hand. Anyone can TRY to post this elsewhere if they want. Good luck with that.http://www.
While Native Peoples have the right to be authorities on their religions and cultures, the extent of that authority is not absolute, and cannot be allowed so much sway that it interferes with legitimate spiritual experience and religious conscience. Dissing the person who reads a Lynn Andrews book does nothing to educate that person or give them meaningful parameters for their explorations of the Divine.
Lynn Andrews isn't on my reading list for students, and I don't recommend her works. I have no further responsibility here than to speak the truth about the problem as it exists and move on.
Addressing this point: What about the depletion of their energy, as they are forced to explain over and over to white people why we are not entitled to appropriate their culture?
A) I think that the choice to 'explain over and over to white people' is a choice.
B) No move on the part of the NA community to rein in people who have achieved the status of some "Elder" going out to make a fast buck off the whites. Yeah, Lynn Andrews is a problem, but when someone with enough tribal blood to have the right to live on the Reservation is doing it, it's a bigger one.
I've watched this nonsense with the Native American community and all the Shamanism flap for 20+ years. It's the same silly stuff, with the same silly finger pointing. I -stopped- taking it seriously when I had someone tell me that I couldn't own or read The Indian Herbology of North America", because it contained the word "Indian" in the title.
What? We take up book burning next?
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Needless to say, we do not agree on this issue.
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1) Saying that what a writer does is wrong and hurtful is not an attack on those who happened to find a spiritual resonance in what that writer wrote. Stop defending "the person who reads a Lynn Andrews book". We're not talking about that theoretical, abstracted, innocently ignorant person. We're talking about an individual author who is stripmining cultures, for a profit, and ignoring the actual representatives of that culture when they object.
Consider, if it helps, that the individual who came to this realization might have been even better served by learning more about real practices, and/or might have been equally served by a book the author wrote without having to appropriate and misrepresent someone else's culture.
2) A) I think that the choice to 'explain over and over to white people' is a choice.
Yes, I suppose. There is also a "choice" to defend yourself when you are struck, technically. You can also just keep taking your lumps if you are so inclined. You have the "choice" to confront a thief. You can just let them take what they want. But theft and assault are still wrong, even if you're too tired, or too weak, or the loss "isn't worth enough" to "choose" to keep resisting actively.
It's great the way you conflate saying "This author is doing something wrong" with book burning, but how about responding to the actual people who're talking to you, instead of ignoring them to decry other people who're easier to villify?
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The OP here put up a link to a flawed article that basically ran around the same tree that those who claim to speak for the Native American community always run around. Why yes! Lynn Andrews is STILL a hack that no one with a clue respects. No one is disputing that.
The activism part comes in when the OP actually expects people to get all righteous about something that has been going on for the last 20+ years. I think everyone can find a responsible way to deal with the problem of hacks, and many pagans simply tell people not to waste their money on the books and crap in the -first- place.
Not enough? So tell us what -is- enough? Should we attack people who innocently pick up some dreck title by a woowoo hack, or find other ways to get them to where they think they want to go? Maybe drive to Lynn Andrews' house and call her out for some fisticuffs in the Medicine Wheel in her back yard?
Funny, but I thought that economic sanctions work pretty well. Now there ain't crap we can do about the New Agers who are playing, because their boundaries are so fluid that you can't even contain them in a glass, but maybe we're now supposed to go make war with those people too....
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