Indigenous Issues

Indigenous Issues

People gain their identities through a relationship with their land and through a relationship with their sacred cultural traditions. When you take a people’s land and traditions you prevent identity formation for an entire nation. Someone who takes on another identity is cultural appropriation – but theft of land and traditions is identity loss for an entire nation. In this way the worse form of cultural appropriation is land and sacred traditions. That said, a non-indigenous artist who has appropriated sacred knowledge will argue identity theft is the worst form of cultural appropriation simply because their mind can’t deal with what they did. This definition of cultural appropriation, though, does not lie in the mind of the person/s who took something that is not theirs.