No More Indian Mascots Allowed? Are they demeaning or empowering?

[gazhekwe]

Canuck said...reappropriation of these symbols by first nations has been sometimes enabled by the existence of these, in the non-indigenous world-at-large.

"Reappropriation" is a two-edged sword. Are we adopting something that the white society has played up inaccurately? Or are we going back in our own oral traditions and maybe supplementing with concurrent historic accounts by visitors, taking into account their cultural bias? And then there is that whole bit where kids have no real understanding of their own culture due to displacement, and adopt the stereotypes presented by mainstream society as a way of identifying with their lost culture. This happens much in urban settings, and where the education system has failed to give any positive cultural information or history of Native people. What else do these young people have to inform them?

These stereotypes may well be "superannuated symbols of yesteryear" to some, but in the Native world, they are misrepresentations of a deeply religious culture and misuse of sacred symbols.

Giving mainstream society all the credit for the Warrior Flag is completely ethnocentric. Do you really think Native cultures were so completely obliterated that no one but mainstream people could know about them?