reclaiming wordsEveryone is reclaiming words... turning what was once spewed with hate into something different, closer to home. Americans of African descent. Americans of Mexican decent. Then there is the whole queer, fag, dyke thing. Like I said, everybody is doing it....
A lot has been written/filmed about the American Indian (there is no such thing as a Native American)... positive stuff, and then there is that genre that will never die...yes, they still run those dirty westerns in which "the only good Indian is a dead Indian".
I got the idea for the plains style Ceremonial dress from what was printed on the back of an old post card from "Indian Country in South Dakota".... made when postage for said card was only one RED cent... (another one of THOSE words). I found it in an antique shop on the Oregon coast and it got me thinking of words that we as Indians could steal back from the people who stole from us..... the card says, "Sioux Indian Chief and squaw" squaw, I hadn't heard that word in a lot of years.... it was like hearing the word "DYKE" come out of a skinhead's mouth..... there's still plenty of bigotry in Indian country. Just read Counting Coup.... a great book on what Crow Indians face in "modern" day Montana.
Right after the postcard I got this book as a gift, "Waterlilly" by a Yankton Sioux (Lakota) woman named Ella Cara Deloria. She was born in 1889 and lived on the Standing Rock Reservation of the Teton Sioux. She was an anthro (Indian slang for Anthropologists) when Indian women didn't do that kind of thing. Her book didn't get published in her lifetime. It is the story, primarily, about the life of women in a Lakota tribe before the plains were colonized by whites. As I read it, I thought about the word Squaw, then came Redskin, Heathen, and Savage. All I could think of was, "here is a piece of historical fiction, written by someone who grew up in the culture, if not the same time as when the story takes place, and all I can see in my mind's eye are families eaking out a sometimes hard existence and remembering the kinships that make survival possible. All I saw in the pages were concrete examples of the untruths in all those words.
New definitions for old words:with quotes from the book.
Savage - "the constants of life went on...men and women worked, children played, old men sat dreaming of past glories, and old women fussed over children." and "children loved to give. They gave themselves, or their elders gave in their name, honoring them, until they learned to feel a responsibility to do so..."
Redskin - "by this initial and voluntary gesture, he had pledged to spare nothing to make the sons of his sisters and women cousins into brave and worthy men."
Squaw - "Camp life was carried on the back's of women. They scraped hides on their knees, chewed sinew with their teeth, and sometimes gave birth alone, never crying out in pain because to do so would dishonor them." and "women worked hard to provide all that was necessary to their family and those in close kinship. Constantly giving thanks to the Great Spirit for what they had, no matter how little it was."
Heathen - "O Grandfather hear me! Since the very beginning you have been here. Before there were any men, you were here. And it is certain that long after we are all gone you will remain. Hear me Grandfather and pity me."
The dress and parfletch are made from recycled paper, cigarette pack foil (how prison of me), handmade FIMO beads, old style typewriter key stickers, ink and oil pencils.
