Wait, we can not break bread with you. You have taken the land which is rightfully ours. Years from now my people will be forced to live in mobile homes on reservations. Your people will wear cardigans, and drink highballs. We will sell our bracelets by the road sides, and you will play golf. My people will have pain and degradation. Your people will have stick shifts. The gods of my tribe have spoken. They said do not trust the pilgrims. And especially do not trust Sarah Miller. For all these reasons I have decided to scalp you and burn your village to the ground.
Happy Thanksgiving, my fellow Canadians! And listen to Wednesday Addams.
I mean, without a doubt what she says is true and all, but when you really think about it, the whole scene is very fucked up. Wednesday Addams was a white girl appropriating the clothing and the voice of Natives, AKA the “other”, not so as to protest the mistreatment of Natives by the colonizing Europeans (which, even if that was what she was doing, I’d still be against her methods), but so as to make a really entitled and fucked up comparison between herself and her gang o’ freaks as the oppressed “other” and Sarah Miller and her Rich Popular Preppy Friends as the norm they are raging against. This is a device we often see in Hollywood films with white girls who’s families come from missionaries or villages or tribes among people of color and are, just like those magical exotic people of color, oppressed outsiders! It isn’t really about calling out whiteness (though they do to an extent) so much as whiteness trying to appropriate struggles, make really false entitled conflations (“I speak Spanish and once my family went to Caribbean and I totally felt at home with the Natives so I am JUST like you!”) so as to be a special snowflake.
What’s more, in the scene, there are actual POC children*(I don’t want to say they’re Native American but they look like they probably are indigenous.) who are just pushed at the side while Wednesday runs her mouth and looks like the hero telling THEIR tales. That’s because again, this isn’t really about them anyways, this is about Wednesday looking valiant in the face of snooty snobby pretentious Sarah Miller, her
oppressorrival. Else, why the fuck are we listening to Wednesday Addams, who is coming all wrong anyways, and not the native children themselves?What’s EVEN more fucked up is that even in this alleged “positive” depiction of a native person/struggles, in the end of the scene, Wednesday and her friends then default to the fucked up and wholly wrong stereotype of natives as being those angry, violent, savages who scalp poor pure white girls and attack the pilgrims. First off-Natives people ARE NOT a monolith. While some were war-faring, others yet were so peaceful and non-violent, they did not even believe in fighting against those that attacked them. The Taino (which means ‘good’ in Arawak) of the Dominican Republic, the first to ever meet with the genocidal colonizers, were so kind and welcoming, even that columbus fuck himself spoke well of them and came to deeply regret the way he destroyed them and ravaged their culture. Hell, maybe if they were a bit more war-faring it would’ve scared Europeans off and saved the whole continent the grief! Anyways, The “cannibalistic scalping savage” stereotype was initially created so as to justify their subjugation, and to paint the Europeans as civilized victims. The thing of it is, all of the Native peoples, regardless of how war-faring or peaceful or whatever they might have been, had long-established, thriving, nuanced, individualistic societies, cultures, habits, traditions, beliefs, governments, systems, and territories that were theirs to have and worked for them and self-determination and autonomy that should’ve been respected. All of that was dismissed, spit upon, destroyed, and exploited by Europeans. It doesn’t matter if Europeans thought them “civil” or not, it wasn’t their place to come in and kill them off and steal their land.
This scene merely exploits all of that for whiteness’ sake, and that’s not cool.
*You can miss me with how in white media, POC youths are “othered” on level with the fucking white goth kid who drinks blood. “You like to carve pentagrams into the desk, you’re first generation Chinese, wow, we’re all such fuck ups and misfits!”
Will be reblogging on American Thanksgiving! Very apropos Canadian thanksgiving falling on Columbus day
Shaun Kardinal
Johnny Benson
