‘Indigenous’ is the new ‘Oriental’ – and that opens the door to pretendians

Interesting take:

…Today, the resurgence of genuine Aboriginal cultural practices must battle against the totalizing power of “Indigeneity” and all of those cultural tropes. Even powwows are relatively modern inventions, and while broadly based in our ancient seasonal tribal gatherings, these events are more Indigenous than they are rooted in any actual First Nations traditions. Some of these practices do have traditional antecedents, but they are by no means universal Aboriginal practices: they are the hallmarks of an Indigenous culture ungrounded by history, culture, or tradition.

Which brings us to the pretendians, who could be argued to be the true Indigenous people. Pretendians amalgamate cultural tropes as a kind of modern-day regalia. It has been said that you can spot pretendians because it looks like “an Etsy shop exploded” on them, so besotted are they with the beaded necklaces, the turquoise rings, and the leather medicine bag containing the mandatory collection of cedar, sage, sweetgrass and tobacco – a concoction with, you guessed it, no historical antecedents. But in reality, the best pretendians have learned to adopt just enough Indigenous regalia to look the part, and sadly, the image they present is how many people now expect Aboriginal people to look and dress.

Indigeneity has become such a powerful force that many contemporary Aboriginal people have come to share these same false beliefs: the power of Indigenous culture runs roughshod over our actual tribal and historic practices. And into this broken system of traditional knowledge has stepped the pretendian: the non-Aboriginal person who adeptly manipulates and deploys the fake culture of non-existent people. 

Indigeneity, like Orientalism, was never a thing. Indigeneity is a projection of meaning, but our cultural embrace of capital-I “Indigenous” has created the conditions under which flourishes the very false identity and fake symbolism against which people rightly rage. If we hope to marginalize pretendians, we must all work to be more specific in our language, engage more deeply with individual Aboriginal communities, and render “Indigenous” as ineffectual as “Oriental.”

Douglas Sanderson (Amo Binashii) is the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy at the University of Toronto’s faculty of law. This essay is adapted from his upcoming book We Were Once Brothers.

Source: ‘Indigenous’ is the new ‘Oriental’ – and that opens the door to pretendians