Cultural appropriation is a huge problem. It makes it even worse that "legitimate" Aboriginal people grapple and struggle with personal identity everyday. When it comes to being around other Metis or Aboriginal people, the first question you are always asked when you meet someone is "where are your people from?" This springs from an oral-history culture, and it's why the question is asked, but I tend to feel, more and more, that the question is asked now as much to trace legitimacy as to carry on a traditional tracing of ancestry. The suspicion that there are "fakes" among us is pretty strong among many Aboriginal Canadians. I have a Metis Status card, which means I had to had a fully researched historically accurate lineage and family tree drawn up by an officially sanctioned third party to prove that my ancestors are indeed Aboriginal, but I internally grapple with questions of legitimacy: I was raised in a very Anglo-Saxon city-kid sort of way, and while I've always been visibly different than other kids with my black hair and skin that always looks sun-kissed, I really only took an interest in claiming my culture in my teen years. If I look back, I realize that my mother was deeply ashamed of her ancestry, to the point where she was and is in denial of who she is. She's suffered from mental health problems for at least as long as I've been alive, and I can't help but feel that this is tied to her being adopted and raised by white people in a white community as the only non-white person in her entire small town. She was taught to deny her true self since she was a baby. I remember being asked as a kid if I was an Indian by other classmates and my mom telling me to tell them I was French. Unfortunately, shame is a ingrained in many Aboriginal people of her generation, and I'd say that loss of identity and assimilation are part of the contemporary Aboriginal experience. While I feel that my choice to embrace and invest in my ancestral culture is an intentional action made against accepting loss and losing the war, I wonder if I am not legitimate enough - did I need to grow up in a teepee to be legitimate, do I need to wear moccasins all the time? I know that many people of my generation struggle with this. It's a huge part of claiming one's identity. So it seems, in the end that what Timothy Patrick Barrus has done is a full-fledge betrail against the people he claims kinship with. And this is a terrible thing.
There's the other part of me, the one that worked as a journalist, who knows that writting the truth is very hard. No matter what, what you write is coloured by the fact that, even in the non-fiction genre, writting is narrative. I listend to interview tapes dozens of times, over and over. Even when quoting someone directly, there is editing: I cut out the "umms" "ah's", " y'knows?" and the hesitations and self corrections. No matter what you write, it is from your personal perspective. It's like the conundrum of emphasis: an actor and I were discussing a script and he told me about this sentence where how the verbal emphasis is placed changes the context entirely: "I didn't say he stole the money"
"I didn't say he stole the money" might mean "it was not me that accused him."
"I didn't say he stole the money" might mean "he's not the one who stole it."
"I didn't say he stole the money" might mean "he only borrowed the money."
Then comes the even more complex layer of how the listener hears and then reports the words, and then yet another layer of how the reader takes meaning from what has been written. So you have 1) the speaker, 2) the listener, 3) the write (who is often the same person as #2, but is in very different mode as writer: a listener is passive, a writer is active), and 4) the reader all between what is said and what is understood to be said, even in writting a simple quote like this. Non-fiction is so tricky. And in that personal perspective, of events, written down and then read come through so many layers, there is the additional possibility of the impostor. Is the person speaking telling the truth, does the listener actually hear him right, does the writer write it down accurately, how does the reader's personal biases effect how he/she understands it? Anywhere along that line meaning can be intentionally or accidentally shifted or bent by a single nuance. And if your head isn't spinning already, even through all these layers of perspective, there is the possibility that any of the tellers involved may or may not have remember the instance accurately, or that their telling may be shaped by additional variables. When it comes to writers, there's the obvious impostor, like Timothy Patrick Barrus, and there's the rest of us, who at best, can simply tell our own truth, and hope that in the telling, it remains true. I'm absolutely facinated by truth and its slippery telling, but I geneally stick to the fictional, because, really, it's easier.
As a side note, James Frey is going to be on Oprah again today, and I'll be interested in what he has to say.
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Topic: Cultural Hijacking (Read 4402 times)