Appropriations, and The Concept of Human Entitlement

Max is back home now, and happily running amok. Even after a full evening, night, and morning with him, I found myself following after him, just watching him and aching with how much I love the little disaster-invoking fur ball. He's oblivious to my residual, PTSD fretting, of course, and seems perpetually surprised to find me hovering, whenever he turns around, and thus merps his little trilling greeting and comes trotting over to me for chin scratches and to offer me love nibbles. I love him all the more for that. The discharge papers from the vet described him as capable of being 'very affectionate' but also capable of being 'quite fractious'. That's Mad Max, just like his namesake.

But onto the meat of this post. I've posted before about Native appropriations, and everything I said in those posts, still stands. This time I'm focusing on a different sort of appropriation, one that the public at large has probably not even noticed, or registered, and one that I'm sure at least a chunk of folks will tell me is simply me taking offense to something unoffensive. But I'm going to write the post anyway.

It all started with a trip to Starbucks. I had gone and gotten Max from the overnight vet, and transferred him to our regular vet for daytime care, and on my way out of town I stopped to nab some coffee goodness for my coworker and myself. While I was waiting for my order, I noticed another patron's shoes. My instant response was *I WANT THOSE SHOES* but then I looked at them more closely, and my insta-love turned into insta-loathing. Such insta-loathing that I covertly snapped a photograph to be used for this post.

Here's the thing. Those shoes are awesome, because they look like actual pointe shoes. The problem is, you don't just 'get' pointe shoes, you earn them. And you earn them by doing years of hella hard fucking work. This is a picture I've seen going around which is a great representation of the sacrifice that goes into gaining the beauty of a pointe shoe.

My point (no pun intended) is, pointe shoes are a right you earn, not an accessory you wear. Before anyone argues with me, I know it's *possible* the woman in Starbucks is a dancer, but her body says otherwise. If she danced, it was years in the past. So what right does she have to wear a pointe shoe, or a shoe designed to look so much like an actual pointe shoe, that at a glance one would think it was a real pointe shoe?

And I don't feel this way only about this specific pair of shoes, and this specific incident. I was rolling in my grave, so to say, over the obsession with fashion riding boots - and 'riding pants' - in recent years. Uh, no. I've spent 26 years working to earn the right to wear riding boots - and let me tell you, honey, even I don't wear the black boots with the brown tops, hunt-tops, they're called. That's formal hunting attire, to be worn only with a red hunt coat (there are numerous regulations) and if you aren't a member of a hunt club, you don't wear that shit. And yet, here I am surrounded by people, many of whom have never even touched a real horse, wearing 'riding boots' and 'riding pants' (For the record, they're called jodhpurs if you're a junior, and you were them with leather garter straps around the leg below the knee, and jodhpur boots. They're called breeches, if you're older and those are worn with tall leather boots, field boots for hunt riders, and dress boots for dressage riders. There are major differences in attire across the disciplines) while I'm just walking around in my jeans, and my breeches and field boots are in the closet, because, you know, I'm not riding a horse, I'm walking down the street. Look at this hot mess, which I found particularly amusing and irritating, with its fake little 'spur' around the heel. No riding boot ever looked like this.

Where did this concept of I'm a human, therefore I'm entitled to wear anything that looks cool come from? I understand such appropriations have been going on for centuries, but they've certainly gotten more profound or, perhaps, more widely visible in recent years. I'm sure much of such visibility comes from the internet and social media. But I still fail to grasp why society in general thinks it's okay to appropriate things. I look at fashion icons (I'm thinking Michael Jackson, whose distinctive style was influenced by various things, but which never actually copied anything that I know of) who created their own style without appropriating cultures or skills. Yes, at some point in their career, I'm sure something was appropriated, inadvertently or otherwise, but they didn't sell entire fashion lines by taking another cultures style. And no, I don't count Cher and her 'Cherokee' outfit as an appropriation because she is of American Indian descent (in part, at least). 

Appropriation has been in the news quite a lot recently, and I think that's a good thing. But I think we also need to take it further. Enough of this picking and choosing what's okay to appropriate, and what's not okay to appropriate. If you aren't of American Indian descent, don't wear something that utilizes one of their cultures, unless it's something you bought directly from an American Indian artist. I wear tons of turquoise, but I don't wear anything with religious emblems, or tribal patterns, not unless it's an item I bought from a Native artist. If you don't ride horses, don't wear freaking 'riding boots' or 'riding pants'. If you're not a ballet dancer, don't wear pointe shoes, or shoes that mimic true pointe shoes. Be aware of crap like Givenchy using words like chola to in their fashion designs, and lines, when they have no right to, and have no understanding of what the word means to those who do have a right to use it. Don't be sporting bindis just because they sparkle. Pierce your nose if you want, but don't wear jewelry designed to mimic the plethora of nose-specific jewelry worn by the various cultures of India, because, you know, those styles mean something spiritually and religiously to those peoples.

Basically, if something being utilized in fashion is defended by the designer as 'simply inspiration' or 'just hair' or 'just makeup' then you need to take a closer look at the designer/company, and why they feel like they have the right to 'just use' whatever it is they've utilized in their fashions. The same goes for popular trends. If it's something that seems cool because it makes you feel like another culture, or whatever, then you probably ought to look at it a second time, and discern whether it's something that was actually inspired by a culture or subset, or if it's something that simply copies an existing culture or subset. 

Four Hundred Years And No Progress At All

Sometimes, I’m ashamed of every fragment of my DNA that is not identifiable as Cherokee.

This is one of those times.

On February 18 the London-based fashion company KTZ, designed by Marjan Pejoski revealed its ready to wear Fall line at New York Fashion Week. The problem with the 2015 Fall line designed by Marjan Pejoski is that Marjan Pejoski didn’t design any of it. 

Oh, you haven’t seen any headlines leading with ‘Famed Fashion House Plagiarizes Existing Designs’? Me neither. And the sad part, is that you’re not going to. Not unless mainstream-everywhere suddenly realizes that using other peoples’ cultures to add a ‘primitive touch’ to clothing, art, or, well, anything, is wrong.

Pejoski states - very proudly - in an interview with Milk Made

“-as a way of paying tribute to the country, to the land, and all the indigenous people, it was based on the Native Americans, after a lot of research obviously. With every collection I go through lots of troubles when I take different countries and places, and coming to America was something that I wanted to explore. I’ve always adored Native Americans and their culture since I was a kid and I always loved their flamboyancy and their furs and feathers and leathers, and it was just something that was almost very close to me to do.”

Huh. It’s almost as if Perjoski, like about 98% of mainstream hive-mind America, doesn’t understand that the term ‘Native Americans’ does not connote one massive universal culture, but rather it encompasses hundreds of individual entirely unique and entirely different cultures. Loved their flamboyancy? It’s like Perjoski thinks of the various clothing types, patterns, styles and colors used by the different tribes as daring fashion choices instead of what they are: Representations of religious figures, theories and symbols, of family heritage, history individual culture.

Pejoski says that his 2015 Fall line “-was based on the Native Americans, after a lot of research obviously.” and that it is “-a tribute to ‘the primal woman indigenous to this land,’ who evolves into a sexualized, empowered being.”

With claims like those, I’m a tad confused as to why Union Army kepis and military style coats and braiding were used in the line as both accessories and designs. I wonder if Pejoski meant for them to somehow honor the thousands of unknown and unnamed women captured, raped, traded and sold by soldiers during the Indian Wars, which took place pretty much from the moment that settlers arrived until (officially) 1890, though armed conflicts continued sporadically until the 1920s. Is that what he intended to honor?

But let us set aside my confusion over what Pejoski states that he wanted to say, and what he did say, with this clothing line, and let us, instead, focus on this single, simplistic declaration by Pejoski during his Milk Made interview:“-we do a lot of custom-made things—every detail you see is everything we developed in house, the whole thing.”

If every detail you see in Pejoski’s line is developed in house - the whole thing - then how, pray tell, did the family beadwork designs of Bethany Yellowtail’s ancestors end up on a dress in his runway show? Below is a side-by-side of the dresses for comparison. On the left is Yellowtail’s Apsaalooke Night dress (2014) which is based on beadwork from her great-grandmother’s collection. On the right is the dress from the 2015 KTZ line.

If you’re looking at the two dresses and thinking “What is she talking about? So they both have triangles and squares?” bear with me. The issue here isn’t about whether or not the mass public can see or understand the importance of Yellowtail’s designs. The issue is that the designs are sacred to Yellowtail, a Crow/Northern Cheyenne and they are sacred to all Crow people. It’s also a portrayal of her own great-grandmother’s beadwork.

The matching silhouettes and lengths of the dresses aside, you don’t just artistically arrange some shapes and accidentally recreate a generations-old pattern of beadwork. Pejoski took a historically, culturally, important - and for Yellowtail, an incredibly personal - beadwork design, loosened it and called it his own creation. Pejoski’s line is not ‘inspired by’ the designs, color, and forms of American Indians, it’s a twisted amalgamation of blatantly copied designs, constructed with absolutely no consideration for the multiple cultures he was pillaging and bastardizing.

Here is another glaring example of Pejoski’s theft of pre-existing cultural designs. In this case, Lakota skinners who have been ripped off.

The greatest tragedy of this fashion conflict is not even the gross affronts committed by Pejoski himself. People do stupid things. Artistic people of position and means often do incredibly stupid things. The greatest tragedy of this debacle is that the mainstream media doesn’t even know it’s going on. And any of the larger mainstream outlets who have noticed what’s happening, are choosing to very politically stay mum about it, rather than openly making a stand one way or the other.

Despite that online entities like Beyond Buckskin and Indian Country among others, are coming out in support of Bethany Yellowtail, and are denouncing the appropriations of traditional American Indian designs, the mainstream media hasn’t noticed, or if they have noticed, they’ve remained conspicuously silent about it.

A simple Google under KTZ 2015 Fashion Week reveals pages of articles touting Pejoski’s fall lineup as a triumph, a bold, primally satisfying group that any woman would want to wear. It is only Native-based sites, or more outspoken, less mainstream sites who have made any mention of the ongoing conflict, and then it’s often in a passing article, a note of interest that’s quickly set aside.

People who aren’t associated with any specific American Indian tribe (or any other indigenous peoples) fail to see what the big deal is, and in this world of social media and distanced opinions, most of them opt to shrug and suggest that it’s not, in fact a big deal and that those of us who have grievances should just get over it, already.

For the last four hundred years the indigenous peoples of America have been slaughtered, demeaned, shoved aside, cheated out of their own cultures, and disregarded in general, and all along the way they’re been told to get over it.

Now, those who have managed to survive repeated assaults by the American army, who have managed to surpass the excruciating poverty and impediments forced upon them by the United States government, those individuals like Bethany Yellowtail who have succeeded in becoming forces within their own industries are effectively still being told to get over it when a non-Native person like Marjan Pejoski decides to loot the ancestral coffers of cultures not their own.

Four hundred years of history, and mainstream America still cannot grasp the concept that you don’t have a right to claim something just because you like it.