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"Go Native" event in Oakland
Anybody in Oakland know anything about this?
eta: the original poster/flyer are still up here at tribe.net. There's also a post about the statement from AIM West, with plenty of "no *we'll* define whats really racist not the native community" in the comments.
Anybody in Oakland know anything about this?
eta: the original poster/flyer are still up here at tribe.net. There's also a post about the statement from AIM West, with plenty of "no *we'll* define whats really racist not the native community" in the comments.
To the promoters of this event,
This is so racist. You are promoting racism and essentializing me and my family. I am an American Indian. Emails, events, and messages like this are a key reason that Native people continue to be oppressed and despicably subjugated in our own land. I understand that colonizers long to assume our image - or what they assume and invent to be our image - so that they can surpass the guilt of taking part in the ongoing occupation of North America, but this fakery cannot succeed in washing the blood from American hands.
If you want to make a constructive statement about the state of Native America, try the following “Indian” costumes:
(1) Come in jeans and a T-shirt, hooked up to an IV or in a coffin to represent the fact that Native people in this country have the poorest health and highest rates of nearly every preventable disease than any other ethnic group. When you walk into the party, ask fellow party-goers if they have access to adequate health care and nutritious food. If they do, tell them that they better get involved in the struggle to make these available in Indian Country.
(2) Come in Khakis and a button-shirt, without any of your children to represent the century during which Indian people in the United States and Canada had their children forcibly taken from them for years at a time and sometimes permanently, resulting in entire generations of people disconnected from their families, histories, and selves. This ultimately caused rates of alcoholism, mental health conditions, and violence to skyrocket in our communities, which continues to haunt us.
(3) Come in cargo pants and a tank top, in a noose, with slit wrists, or with a belly full of pills to represent the fact that we have the highest suicide rate of any ethnic group. Ask your fellow party-goers if they could maintain their will to live if they went through everyday in a country in which their ancestors’ land is continually occupied in a most violent manner, in which they and their family were not granted American citizenship or the right to vote until the mid 1920s, and any rebellion on their part was met with a return to wholesale slaughter of their family, long-term wrongful imprisonment (never forget Leonard Peltier), or even worse - completely ignored, while fliers and promotions for events encouraged everyone to come dressed as an invented idea of a romanticized, mono-spiritual, one-dimensional and INVENTED version of them.
By the way, the Native American Church - as great of a survival tool as it is, for we indigenous people have been forced to become great at survival - is not an ancient “Indian” religion, but a CHRISTIAN church, an attempt to keep some of ourselves in the midst of our colonization, of which religion played a key role.
TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO ARE RECEIVING THIS - please take a moment to voice opposition to the promotion of this event. It is essential to the struggle against our continued colonization. Please email brain_dancing@yahoo.com and SacredLiving@yahoogroups.com to voice your concern.
Sincerely,
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