#when those indigenous people were just working before the colonizers woke up and felt no need to kill themselves in midday heat

[queers4years]

Indigenous Hawaiians really had a good system going: wake up reaaally early and do most of the days work while it's cool and by the time the sun was up and it got hot the work was done and you're free to surf and socialize. I wish the white people realized they themselves could work smarter and not harder and get time to relax. Instead of calling Hawaiians lazy (and being genocidal about it)

[coexiising]

Fade Into You - Chapter Four

SUMMARY ✦ Your first day at Vader’s castle.

WARNING ✦ N/A

MASTERLIST ✦ Here.

The first thing you noticed when your senses were given back to you was the warm heat emitting from whatever you were laying on. When you opened your eyes you saw that there was a small blanket draped below you, and you laid on some kind of tiny mattress. Upon further inspection, you saw that you were in some type of room - or much rather a cell, since it was clear that there was no way to get out of here. You felt overwhelmed, mentally cursing yourself to think that this could possibly work. You had walked right into the hands of a Sith, a very powerful Sith whose intentions you didn’t know at all.

Sitting up, a pounding pressure was felt in your head, it was dull and made you disoriented for a moment. Your thoughts took you back to the last moment you could remember, Vader grabbing you by the throat and pushing you up against the wall. Your head must’ve hit the rock hard and you were just now feeling the aftermath that the encounter had on your body. You could still feel the phantom touch of his hand around your throat, instinctively reaching up and touching the pads of your fingers against the nape of your neck. It was a little sore.

The room wasn’t very big, and it looked as though you were the first person to ever set foot in it before. Honestly it looked like it had been put together in a rush, possibly Vader trying to find a place for you. It wouldn’t be the first time that you had been held hostage by someone, but it was the first time that they had held you in anything other than a cell or in shackles. You knew there was no way that he would leave the door open, so there was no point in even trying.

You weren’t sure how long you sat there, scanning the area to get a good sense of your surroundings and waiting for him to come. When you did hear footsteps approaching the door, you put your legs up against your chest, watching the knob turn and there was Vader, standing with a plate in his hands. Your stomach rumbled, reminding you that you had yet to eat anything today except for a cup of tea in the Council Room. Was it even ‘today’ still? You still didn’t know how long you had been passed out for.

He kicked the door closed behind him and set the plate down on the side table. “Sorry, it’s the first time I’ve had a guest over.” There was a tone of amusement behind his voice, like he found this whole situation funny.

“I’m so honored,” You retorted, noting the slight strain in your voice that was no doubt from the choking earlier. “But I think I’ve overstayed my welcome, care to let me go?” You gestured to the door, even though there was a one in a million chance that he would actually consider such a thing. You knew that you were stuck, but maybe you could somehow speak to the part of him that you saw in your dreams.

“What happened to finding out our connection?” Vader asked. “And to think you were starting to grow on me.”

“You lied to me,” You told him, eyes squinting. The smirk left his face and was replaced with him biting his inner cheek, eyes darting to the floor and averting your gaze that stayed centered on him. You could feel it in him, that inner torment that often plagued users of the dark side. He wasn’t like this in your dreams, what had changed?

The solemn look on his face left as quickly as it came. “You shouldn’t have trusted me. Isn’t that what your Council always preaches? That the Sith cannot be trusted?”

“I thought that you were different.”

Vader looked back up at you now, eyes looking directly back up into yours. Everything about him was dark except for those eyes, which for a moment you could’ve sworn you saw a hint of blue flash across them. He couldn’t be much older than you, but he was different in many ways, you two were opposites of a sort. And yet, all you could feel was the constant push of the Force towards him, like you had felt ever since you started seeing him. He was using dark energy, but something told you that he was conflicted. Maybe, just maybe there was a chance that you could bring him back to the light side.

He sucked in a breath, ignoring your statement. “You should eat something, you were out for at least a day.” Vader motioned to the plate on the table. Now that it was eye level with you, you could see that there was a piece of some type of bread and a bowl filled with something that resembled the soup you used to be given at the temple. “And then I can give you the tour.”

“Tour?” You asked.

“You are my guest.”

~

From what you gathered through Vader talking as you followed him through the different rooms of the castle, you could sense that he was a little lonely. He never gave away too much about himself or his past, but there was no one else in residence here, though he did mention that his Master came sometimes to check in on him. It was as though he was a different person than who he was when he cornered you at your first meeting. You wondered why. Maybe it was because he had been threatened.

Vader mentioned that there was no way off of Mustafar. He had taken your ship to Maker knows where and there were no other ships for you to possibly hop on. So your hopes of escaping were somewhat crushed, though there was the possibility of you contacting one of your Masters if Vader kept you alone for long enough. Would they even come if you found a way to reach them? You had disobeyed their orders. No. You thought to yourself. That was just Vader’s talk getting to you. The Order cared about you and your wellbeing. They probably had search parties looking for you right now. And your friends Obi-Wan, Rex, and Ahsoka were probably worried and fronting those teams. You had nothing to worry about . . . Right?

Your footsteps stopped in their tracks when you turned a corner, being met with a familiar window and corridor. The one from your dreams. It was the same, which gave you a sense of deja vu when you resumed walking.

“This is towards the back of the castle,” Vader explained, his footsteps significantly heavier than yours against the hard floor. “I don’t know why the dreams always end up here, the only thing here is the view.” That view, which you were nearing now, looked strikingly different in real life. The lava pooled in the same way and the obsidian looked just as dark as it always did, though now you could feel the heat arise even through the glass, and you could see that there were in fact some types of animals crawling on the rocks. They looked like little salamanders, skittering across the pebbles of brimstone. And to your left you could see a clearing where some plants were living, bushels of flowers erupting from the ground.

“I thought nothing could live on Mustafar,” You said out loud. “That’s what they always told us on Coruscant.”

“There’s some indigenous plants and animals, but nothing else could be brought here to live, which was why it was never colonized,” Vader spoke.

You squint your eyes, turning on your heel. “But you live here. Isn’t that dangerous?”

“I’ve always been here,” Vader said, shrugging his shoulders. “Ever since I was young. But it’s the same thing as you and the Jedi, they’re always taking young children.”

“But that’s different. The Jedi take and train kids to be peacekeepers,” You replied. It did pain you to think that you would never know who your parents really were, or if you had a big family. But it had always been that way, the Jedi were your family, they were the ones who cared for you. “They’re trying to make a difference in the Galaxy.”

You heard him laugh, which ticked you off more than it should’ve. “They still take kids from their families.”

“Are you really trying to have a morality competition with me, when you’re a Sith?” You retorted, shutting down this conversation before it went any further. You may be stuck here and you may be connected to him, but you weren’t going to listen to him talk about the Jedi in a bad light. Those were your people, on the right side of this whole war. Just because there was no way that you were leaving any time soon didn’t mean that you were going to be converted to the dark side. If anything, all you wanted to do was figure out this whole dilemma and then cut it off and never see this ‘Darth Vader’ again unless he was at the end of your lightsaber.

Both of you were quiet then, until he said, “I do have a name, you don’t get to come to my home and not call me by it. I won’t be disrespected in my own home. I’m a Lord.”

Now it was your turn to laugh, and you did it shamelessly. Was he really speaking to you about you respecting him, when he wasn’t respecting any of your wishes?

“I’m not calling you by your Sith name,” You said.

Vader didn’t respond, instead turning and grabbing you by the arm and walking down the hall. You didn’t fight back, knowing that he was just taking you back to the room you woke up in. Apparently he’d had enough of your backtalk for today. And he didn’t say anything when he pushed you back in and closed the door. You heard the lock click and shook your head, knowing nothing good was coming out of this.

Time went by, which you spent by exploring the room in depth. There really wasn’t much, but you did find a clock that you propped up against the wall, seeing that it was getting late. And you found another blanket in one of the drawers, you covered yourself in it and sat back down on the tiny bed, if you closed your eyes you could pretend that you were back at the Temple. You reached out through the Force, but everything was blocked. Vader probably wasn’t going to allow any kind of Force communication through, and it was useless anyways. Mustafar was so far away from Coruscant, so only a Jedi passing by would be able to sense anything. And it wasn’t like they were out in this region of the Outer Rim often.

You thought that the most boring thing about the room is that there was really nothing to do. There wasn’t a holopad for you to scroll through videos and articles endlessly, and there weren't even any books for you to read. As time ticked on and it neared eleven at night, you were pretty sure that Vader wasn’t coming back.

Though, like he could sense what you were thinking, the door opened, and Vader was there. He was dressed somewhat more comfortably, a loose black shirt hung off of him unlike his normal, fitted robes. You hated to admit that he looked somewhat attractive like this, shoving those thoughts to the side and giving him a blank expression, wondering what he wanted this time.

“Are you hungry again?” Vader asked. For someone who was supposed to be a Sith, he seemed at least a little bit concerned about your wellbeing. It was as though a switch had been flipped and he was back to his more normal self, if it wasn’t for the glowing amber eyes, you would’ve almost thought that he was a normal person.

You shook your head, knowing that you could wait until the morning to eat something.

“Okay, well, then I’m going to sleep. I’m not sure what will happen now that we’re under the same roof, but from now on our main focus should be figuring out whatever is going on,” He said, like he was suggesting but you knew that it was more of a tell. You wondered what happened after you two discovered this anomaly, if he would let you go or a darker, more sinister fate would fall upon you.

You mumbled something along the lines of ‘okay’ and watched him turn around. But then he stopped, prompting you to raise an eyebrow.

Without even looking at you, he said, “It’s Anakin.” His back was turned to you but he quickly glanced at you, then immediately darted his attention back forward, like he was hiding from you. You looked at him for a moment, not knowing what he was talking about. You hadn’t ever heard that name before . . . And then it dawned on you. That was his real name, not his Sith name. Vader was telling you his real name.

“Anakin,” You said out loud, as if you were testing the name out. It felt good on your tongue, the word spilling off of it with ease. It was a strange name, but it somewhat suited him. Now you could put a name to his face, to those golden locks and the chiseled features that silently knocked your breath away. Anakin was a name of someone you could learn to get along with, Anakin was a name you could trust. That’s who he truly was, deep down, even if he didn’t know it himself. He stiffened as he heard the name come off of your lips, like he hadn’t heard someone say it in forever. It made you even more intrigued, what was his story? He said that he has been here since he was young, how young was he? Who was this Anakin?

More importantly, why hadn’t the Jedi come for him? He was obviously strong with the Force, so why had the Jedi let him slip from their fingers?

“Goodnight, Y/N,” He spoke, not giving you a moment to answer and closing the door. You sat there, thinking about Vader as you finally decided to go to sleep. There was more that met the surface of him, that was for sure, though you wondered how much he would let you know.

Sleep overcame you rather quickly, being swept up into your familiar dreamlike state. But the dream with Vader never came, no matter how much you searched your subconscious for it. Perhaps the Force didn’t want it anymore now that you two were together, maybe this meant that you were headed in the right direction. Instead of meeting Vader literally in your dreams, you found your mind thinking of him, visions of you and him walking together, talking together, laughing together. And when you woke up the next morning, instead of recoiling at the thought of Vader, you were looking forward to your next meeting, hoping that he woke up soon and you two could get started on your day.

Whatever that would entail.

[spacecrone]

Sorry, Cassandra.

So, it's definite then

It's written in the stars, darlings

Everything must come to an end - Susanne Sundfør

I first learned about the climate crisis in 2008, as an undergrad at Hunter College, in a class called The History and Science of Climate Change. For the next decade I would struggle with how to process and act on the scientific paradigm shift climate change required: that human activity could disrupt the climate system and create a planetary ecosystem shift making Earth uninhabitable to human life. I became a climate justice activist and attempted to work directly on The Problem which was actually, as philosopher Timothy Morton writes, a hyperobject, something so systemic and enormous in size and scope as to be almost unintelligible to human awareness. I’ve cycled through probably every single response a person could have to this knowledge, despair, ecstasy, rage, hope. I’ve landed somewhere close to what I might call engaged bewilderment. For me, his particular locale has a soundtrack, and it’s Susanne Sundfør’s cinematic dance dystopia Ten Love Songs, an album that tells a story of love and loss in the Anthropocene. Sundfør is a sonic death doula for the Neoliberal project, with a uniquely Scandinavian version of bleak optimism. To truly grapple with this time of escalating transition, we need to really face what is, not what we hope or fear will be, but what is actually happening. A throbbing beat with shimmering synths around which to orient your dancing mortal envelope can’t hurt.

Susanne Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs was released a few days after Valentine’s Day in February of 2015, six months after I had been organizing Buddhists and meditators for the Peoples Climate March.  I was already a fan, having first heard her voice as part of her collaboration with dreamy synth-pop outfit m83 on the Oblivion soundtrack. Oblivion was visually striking but felt like a long music video. The soaring synths and Sundfør’s powerful voice drove the plot more than the acting, though I loved how Andrea Riseborough played the tragic character Vika, whose story could have been more central to the plot but was sidelined for a traditional Tom Cruise romantic centerpiece. But since the movie was almost proud of its style over investment in substance, the music stood out. The soundscapes were as expansive as the green-screened vistas of 2077  in the movie. It was just nostalgic enough while also feeling totally new, a paradox encapsulated in the name of m83’s similarly wistful and sweeping Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.  I am not exempt from taking comfort in style that signifies a previous era, and I am also not alone in it. It’s a huge industry, and while the MAGA-style yearning for a previous era is one manifestation, maybe there are ways to acknowledge culture as cyclical in a way that doesn’t sacrifice traditional knowledge to some imagined myth of perpetual progress.

When Ten Love Songs came out the following year, I listened to it on repeat for days.  Sundfør seemed to have absorbed the music-driven sci-fi into a concept album, with m83 providing her with a whole new panopoly of sounds at her disposal. Like Oblivion,  Ten Love Songs told the story of a future dystopia with high speed chases, nihilistic pleasure-seeking and operatic decadence against a backdrop of technocratic inequality. It mixed electro-pop with chamber music and I listened to it on a Greyhound ride to Atlantic City in the middle of snowy February. I hadn’t felt like this since high school, that a full album was a sort of soundtrack to my own life, which I could experience as cinematic in some way while the music was playing. This situated me in my own story, of studying climate change as an undergrad and graduating into a financial collapse, working as a personal assistant to an author writing about ecological collapse and ritual use of psychedelics, to joining a Buddhist community and organizing spiritual activists around climate justice. 

Ten Love Songs is a breakup album, with lyrics telling of endings and running out of time. But it didn’t read to me as an album about a single human romantic relationship coming to an end. It felt like a series of vignettes about the planet and its ecosphere breaking up with us, all of us. People. Some songs like Accelerate, one of the album’s singles, throb in an anthem to nihilistic numbness and speeding up into a catastrophe that feels inevitable. Fade Away is a bit lighter, tonally and lyrically, (and if you listen, please note the exquisitely perfect placement of what sounds like a toaster “ding!”), but is still about fading away, falling apart. The way the songs seem to drive a narrative of anthropocenic collapse built on science fiction film scores, the combination of orchestra and techno-pop, absolutely draws on Sundfør’s experience collaborating with m83 for the Oblivion soundtrack, which itself combined Anthony Gonzalez’s love for the adult-scripted teen dramas of his own 80’s adolescence. In Ten Love Songs, Sundfør takes what she learned from this collaboration and scores not a movie but a life experience of living through ecological collapse and all of the heartbreak and desire that erupts in a time when everything seems so close to the knife’s edge.

I am reminded of another Scandinavian dance album that was extremely danceable yet harbored within it a sense of foreboding. The Visitors, ABBA’s eighth studio album, was considered their venture into more mature and complex music. The two couples who comprised the band had divorced the year before it was released, and the entire atmosphere of the album is paranoid, gloomy, and tense. The cover shows the four musicians, on opposite sides of a dark room, ignoring each other. Each song is melancholy and strange in its own way, unique for a pop ensemble like Abba. One song in particular showcases their ability to use an archetype of narrative tragedy and prophesy to tell the story of regret. Cassandra is sung from the perspective of those who didn’t heed the woman cursed by Zeus to foretell the future but never be believed. 

I have always considered myself a pretty big Abba fan, something my high school choir instructor thought was riotously funny. I was born in the 80’s and nobody in my family liked disco, so I seemed like something of an anachronism. But pop music, especially synth-oriented pop, has always felt like a brain massage to me. It could get my inner motor moving when I felt utterly collapsed in resignation to the scary chaos of my early life. But I only discovered the song Cassandra in 2017, while giving The Visitors a full listen. It felt like I had never heard the song before, though, as a fan I must have. But something about 2015 made the song stand out more. It starts with piano, soft tambourine, and the ambient sound of a harbor. It has a coastal Mediterranean vibe, as some Abba songs do, foreshadowing Cassandra’s removal from her home city, an event she foretold but could not get anyone to believe. It’s a farewell song of regret, echoing the regret the members of Abba felt about their own breakups. 

We feel so full of promise at the dawn of a new relationship. Only after the split can we look back and say we saw the fissures in the bond. The signs were there. Why did we ignore them? This happens on an individual level but the Cassandra paradox is an archetype that climate scientists and journalists are very familiar with. This particular Abba song, and the Visitors album overall, uses this archetype to tell the story of a breakup in retrospect. With climate change, the warnings have been there, even before science discovered the rising carbon in the atmosphere. Indigenous peoples have been warning of ecological collapse since colonization began. Because of white supremacy and an unwavering belief in “progress,” perpetual economic and technological development and growth, warnings from any source but especially marginalized sources have been noise to those who benefit from that perpetual growth model and from white supremacy itself. Is there a way to undo the Cassandra curse and render warnings signal BEFORE some major event turns us all into the chorus from Abba’s song, singing “some of us wanted- but none of us could--  listen to words of warning?” Composer Pauline Oliveros called listening a radical act. It is especially so when we listen actively to the sounds and signals of those we would otherwise overlook.

When I look back at my life in the time that Sundfør’s Ten Love Songs and m83’s movie music seems nostalgic for, the late 1980’s in New Jersey,  I was a child with deeply dissociative and escapist tendencies, which helped me survive unresolved grief, loss, and chaos. I recognize my love for Abba’s hypnotic synth music as a surrendering to the precise and driving rhythm of an all-encompassing sound experience. I also see how my early life prepared me to be sensitized to the story climate science was telling when I finally discovered it in 2008. I had already grown up with Save the Whales assemblies and poster-making contests, with a heavy emphasis on cutting six-pack rings so that sea life would not be strangled to death. I knew what it was like to see something terrible happening all around you and to feel powerless to stop it, because of the way my parents seemed incapable of and unsupported in their acting out their own traumatic dysregulation. Wounds, unable to heal, sucking other people into the abyss. I escaped through reading science fiction, listening to music like Abba and Aphex Twin loud enough to rattle my bones. I wanted to overwhelm my own dysregulated nervous system. I dreamed of solitude on other planets, sweeping grey vistas, being the  protagonist of my own story where nothing ever hurt because ice ran through my veins and the fjords around me. My home planet was dying, and nobody could hear those of us screaming into the wind about it.

Ten Love Songs woke up that lost cosmic child who had banished herself to another solar system. Songs of decadence, songs of endings, songs of loss. Though that album was not overtly about climate change, Sundfør did talk about ecological collapse in interviews for her radically different follow-up album Music For People In Trouble. After the success of Ten Love Songs, Sundfør chose to travel to places that she said “might not be around much longer” in order to chronicle the loss of the biosphere for her new album. It is more expressly and urgently about the current global political moment, but the seeds for those themes were present and in my opinion much more potent in the poppier album. But maybe that’s the escapist in me.

The old forms that brought us to this point are in need of end-of-life care. Capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchal theocratic nationalism, neoliberalism, they all need death doulas. Escapism makes sense in response to traumatic stimulus, and for many of us it may have helped us survive difficult circumstances. But if we are to face what it means to be alive on this planet at this moment, we might be here to be present to and help facilitate and ease the process of putting these systems to rest. And maybe this work is not at odds with a dance party. The ability to be visionary about shared alternatives to these dying systems is not inherently escapist, when we are willing to take the steps together to live into those new stories. What would happen if cursed Cassandras, instead of pleading with existing power structures to heed warnings that sound like noise to them, turned to each other to restore the civic body through listening, through bearing witness to each others unacknowledged and thwarted grief over losses unacknowledged by those same systems of coercive power?

Engaged bewilderment means my version of hope, informed by Rebecca Solnit’s work on the topic, comes from the acceptance that things will happen that I could never have imagined possible. Climate change is happening and there are certain scientific certainties built into that trajectory. Some of it is written in the stars. But as with any dynamic system change, we do not know exactly how it will all shake out. These unknowns can be sources of fear and despair, but there is also the possibility for agency, choice and experimentation. The trajectory of my individual life was always going to end in death. Does that make it a failure? Or does it render each choice and engagement of movement towards the unknown an ecstatic act? As the old forms collapse, no need to apologize to the oracles. At this point they are dancing, and hope you’ll join.

[foxeedesign]

With Great Wokeness Comes Great Responsibility

As designers, we must take responsibility for the visuals we create and how they may be perceived by our audience. I don't think we do this enough as we re-purpose imagery for our own intentions oftentimes disregarding cultural symbolism. Why is this a problem? Stereotypes are born from the oversimplification of a complex, multi-layered culture with ignorant imagery that grossly misrepresents the people of this culture and defames the culture itself.

While organizing through a collection of keepsakes I found an old patch I received after participating in a high school level soccer tournament in Floral Park, NY. As I enjoyed having this tactile memory in my grasp, I couldn't help but notice a logo in the center of the soccer ball-shaped patch: a profile of an American Indian. Floral Park Indians was one of the teams we had contended against during the tournament. Now I tried to give Floral Park the benefit of the doubt; Maybe they had a large First Nations community or were close to a reservation or perhaps the owner was American Indian.

Well, Google told me otherwise: according to the 2010 U.S. census, Floral Park's population of 15,863 was 87% White, 8.8% Hispanic or Latino, 6.9% Asian, 1.3% Black, and, drum roll please, 0.1% Native American. That's right, you heard me, 0.1%. How could a town with less than 20 American Indian residents feel entitled to use a logo with imagery that culturally (and inaccurately) represented only 16 out of 15,863 people? Based on demographics alone, Floral Park's use of the American Indian caricature was inappropriate and disrespectful to indigenous culture. As if matters couldn't get any worse, the athletic club continues to claim Indian heritage when a majority of those enrolled are White (FYI, just because you live somewhere that bears an indigenous name nearly barren of American Indians due to your ancestors displacing thousands does not justify stealing their culture). Just in case you were still wondering, this memorabilia hoarder threw that Floral Park Indians patch in the trash without hesitation.

" just because you live somewhere that bears an indigenous name nearly barren of American Indians due to your ancestors displacing thousands does not justify stealing their culture."

This patch triggered some self-reflection: what other products, businesses, and organizations have I come into contact during my life that inappropriately use American Indian imagery? Were there any positive?  My own soccer club was guilty of branding our uniforms with an emblem depicting an American Indian in a feather headdress— a restricted item reserved for the men of various Plains nations who earned the right to wear them (similar to a military award like the Purple Heart, reserved for U.S. Veterans killed or wounded in battle). The club felt entitled to this imagery because it was based in an area named after the displaced Wappinger, an Eastern Algonquian-speaking tribe from New York and Connecticut. Yet the Wappinger are inaccurately portrayed, donning an indigenous item that originated in the Interior Plains.

For past birthdays, I was gifted a neon pink dreamcatcher and "traditional" dreamcatchers in the form of necklaces and earrings. Based on an Ojibwe legend, the dreamcatcher is a Canadian-Indian tradition gradually adopted by neighboring nations, such as the Lakota, that grew in popularity among the indigenous community during the 1960's and 70's Pan-Indian Movement; eventually the Ojibwe item was appropriated and commercialized by the non-Native mainstream media, often abandoning the traditional form of the dreamcatcher. Although I could not learn more about the origins of my dreamcatchers, I don't have high hopes for their authenticity since dreamcatchers were originally hung in Native children's nurseries to ward off negative influences as opposed to being worn as a fashion accessory. Even my UGG moccasins, a trend that infiltrated my high school, were culpable of commercialized attempts to bootleg footwear historic to many indigenous peoples across North America.

Yet thanks to a diverse collection of historical characters portrayed by the American Girl brand, I was lucky to play with an American Girl doll named Kaya'aton'my who, accompanied by a book series, depicted a fictional Native American girl of the Nimíipuu or Nez Perce tribe. When designing the doll's mold, the company carefully researched Kaya's culture and chose to give her a closed mouth due to a Nimíipuu cultural taboo of baring teeth. Today, Kaya is still "marketed as the First American Girl, properly acknowledging that Native people were here in America before any European contact or settlements."

  "Stereotypes are perpetuated by the misuse of cultural imagery in advertising, branding, entertainment, fashion. So how do we fix this?"

Misusing imagery studded with cultural inaccuracies can psychologically damage American Indian children. They grow up confined to stereotypes— i.e. the excessive drunk, the savage, the princess (oh yes, I'm talking about Pocahontas)— limiting their aspirations, lowering their self-esteem, and shaking their cultural pride. Stereotypes lead to discrimination in employment, housing, and credit due to society's warped, misinformed perception that American Indians are more prone to violence, alcoholism, and economic instability. In her legal paper "Straight Stealing: Towards an Indigenous System of Cultural Property Protection," Angela Riley states that "the appropriation of [indigenous] culture by the majority of society continues the systems of dominance and subordination that have been used to colonize, assimilate, and oppress indigenous groups." Appropriation encourages the dominant culture to forget that American Indians are modern people who still struggle with overcoming a history flooded with colonialist attempts to eradicate them and pillage their culture. Starting to sound familiar?

"They grow up confined to stereotypes limiting their aspirations, lowering their self-esteem, and shaking their cultural pride."

 As a Black woman, I understand the harmful effects that result from the misuse of imagery crudely portraying Black culture. Images of the "Mammy" archetype are still used in today's media; you know her better as Aunt Jemima, the face of Quaker Oats Company of Chicago, or even the Pine-Sol Lady uttering her sassy one-liner, "That's the power of Pine-Sol, baby!" The Mammy was created to humanize slavery (acting in the interest of White people) and confine Black women to subservient, caretaker roles "mak[ing] it difficult for them to rise past oppressive structures in work, education or a number of other institutions." The Jezebel archetype, on the other hand, fetishizes Black female bodies, further defining us as sexual objects for the white and male gaze while serving as an excuse to sexually assault and abuse Black women. You may know her contemporary as the Video Vixen or Hip-Hop Honey. But don't forget about her predecessor Saartjie "Sarah" Baartman, a famous Khoikhoi woman exhibited as a European freak show attraction dubbed 'Hottentot Venus' during the 19th century.  

We, as graphic designers, must stay vigilant about cultural misrepresentation that may hide within the imagery we use in our work. Stereotypes are perpetuated by the misuse of cultural imagery in advertising, branding, entertainment, fashion, sports, and so on. How do we fix this? Get educated. After researching a specific culture, wouldn't you be less inclined to re-purpose an image that you learned was historically used to oppress? So unless you are trying to make a piece with commentary about cultural stereotypes, proceed with caution and the utmost respect. Remember, our design choices can have grave consequences on not only your reputation as an ethical designer but the cultural sensitivity of your audience. With great wokeness comes great responsibility.