Appreciation & Appropriation: on Native culture and Loonatheworld

Let’s talk. Yes, about that thing. The thing happening around Loona’s “Midnight” concept comeback. Originally I was using these points in a group discussion but I figured it would be better for me to organize all of my thoughts from beginning to end on this matter in one place, so that I don’t have to constantly stop and come back, and lose some of the points I wanted to make. Now it’s easier for people to read, and it can reach a wider audience.

If I can ask anything of anyone reading it, it be that you read this in its entirety. Yes, I know it’s long. Yes, really long. I know it’s a lot, but it’s only a 20 minute read. But no matter what side you are on, please give it, and me, a chance to bridge a gap between two differing opinions and hopefully we can all agree on the bigger picture in the end.

First, some history about me:

I live in Korea and have for about three years now. I am American. I’ve been following Loona since Heejin’s pre-debut release. I’ve gone to fansigns, events and concerts, the members know me by name at fansigns because I’ve been so much, and they have some of my art on their studio wall. I’ve bought scores of(my poor wallet) of albums. I voted relentlessly in Korea to get them a win. I ran group orders to exhaustion to get them sales. I have supported and loved them with all my heart, and most important of all: I will continue to do so. I wanted to put this out there not as a “bragging right”in any capacity. I wanted to give my full transparent history with Loona so that people know this is coming from someone who loves them and wants nothing but the best for them and that this has not turned me off as a fan of Loona. That I simply want to work toward a solution and not to drop them.

I am also Native. I am considered mixed. My mother is American, her family has been in America for generations but they originally came from Scotland, and some of her ancestors are also Native, but her side is so far removed from the Native culture that it is pretty much irrelevant. My dad is Native. I did not have a relationship with my dad growing up for reasons we won’t get into, but I did have a deeply close relationship with his mother, my grandmother. His father was of the Cherokee nation, and his mother (my grandmother) was Muscogee-Creek. My family (both sides) are from the Appalachian areas of the southeastern US.

Disclaimer: I do not speak for all Native people. Some Natives may feel the same way as I do, and some may think differently. It’s important to note that there are many tribes across the country, as well as many people who may come from more than one, and not everyone must feel the same way. All of their opinions are valid, please don’t discredit anyone if they have differing opinions and are directly affected. This is just for people to read and think on, and to come to their own final opinions.

So that’s my basic bare-bones history, and now with that obligation out of the way, I want to get into what we all came here for:

What is cultural appropriation “actually”?

There’s a clip by video essayist Lindsay Ellis that I really love, and I think it’s appropriate to quote here. I’m going to link to the whole video timestamped to the relevant part, but I do think it’s a great video overall to watch if you have 30 minutes to spare.

This is the part I am going to talk about, quoted directly from Ellis:

“I’d like to take it back a few dozen steps and talk about some of these theoretical terms that have become politically loaded over the last few years, particularly cultural appropriation. As a theoretical term, cultural appropriation is neither bad nor good. It just describes a sociological phenomenon. It may have deleterious or positive effects on certain groups, but the term itself is neutral: Cultural appropriation is the adoption or use of elements of one culture by members of another culture. That’s all it is. That’s what I mean when I say cultural appropriation is a neutral term. For instance, the fact that I wear a claddagh ring, this is a form of cultural appropriation. I’m not Irish. I studied Irish when I was in college, I actually have a minor in Irish studies. But I don’t know if I have any Irish ancestry. I might, I might not. If I do, it’s so far back in the ancestry line as to be completely irrelevant.

[…]If you happen to be American and want a more subjective understanding of what cultural appropriation in movies even is, one of my favorite examples is from a 2003 Bollywood movie called Kal Ho Naa Ho. This movie takes place in “New York” (this was filmed in Toronto). And yeah, this, this is a form of cultural appropriation. I like to use this example because unless you’re super into anime, most Americans have an experienced media that has American culture on the other end of cultural appropriation. Americans are so used to being the dominant producers of media that we aren’t accustomed to seeing what it’s like to be portrayed by a culture that does not care if their product sells in American markets. The fact that cultural appropriation is in theory a neutral term leads to a lot of false equivalencies, i.e. why is this form of cultural appropriation okay, but Gwen Stefani dressing as a sexy [native] warrior is not okay?

Well, it’s a complex issue and there is a lot of intersection over race and class and gender, but here is a general rule of thumb: if it is a culture that was historically exploited by colonialism appropriating a historically colonizing culture, no harm, no foul. […] If it is a historically colonialist culture appropriating a culture that was exploited by colonialism, then people start to get a little cranky. Obviously there are intersections and complexities, but for simplicity’s sake I’ll leave it there for now. But I think most people would agree that unlike something like Pocahontas […]this kind of cultural appropriation is basically harmless. This is what I mean by cultural appropriation being a neutral term. Not all cultural appropriation is created equal. So I think the real question people want the answer to is: where the line is between positive examples of representation and harmful cultural appropriation? And that’s the problem: there isn’t really a line.”

I think sometimes we, as human beings, tend to think of things in terms of black and white when the reality is the world is one huge shade of grey. Some things being okay while others not being okay is a fact of life, it doesn’t have to live and fit within one group: it isn’t an all-or-nothing game. There’s no reason to argue why one instance of appropriation isn’t accepted when this or that one is okay, because not all appropriation is “created equal” and to understand where groups affected by it are coming from, we have to stop thinking of it in tit-for-tat mindsets.

“Basically wiped out”: a short and non-exhaustive history of native peoples in North America

If you are not American or your school just sucked at teaching its own terrible history, here is the absolute briefest of recaps of what happened to the countless Native tribes once settlers reached them:

The ancestors of living Native Americans arrived in what is now the United States at least 15,000 years ago, possibly much earlier, from Asia via Beringia. A vast variety of peoples, societies and cultures subsequently developed. European colonization of the Americas, which began in 1492, resulted in a precipitous decline in Native American population through introduced diseases, warfare, ethnic cleansing, and slavery. After its formation, the United States, as part of its policy of settler colonialism, continued to wage war and perpetrated massacres against many Native American peoples, removed them from their ancestral lands, and subjected them to one-sided treaties and to discriminatory government policies, later focused on forced assimilation, into the 20th century. Since the 1960s, Native American self-determination movements have resulted in changes to the lives of Native Americans, though there are still many contemporary issues faced by Native Americans. Today, there are over five million Native Americans in the United States, 78% of whom live outside reservations.

Natives/Indigenous people were rounded up during the Indian Removal Act of 1830 signed by President Andrew Jackson and sent to live west of the Mississippi River so that the white settlers could take over their ancestral lands for themselves; to live on and farm the land. The mass migration killed hundreds of thousands of Natives from all tribes from disease, famine, exhaustion, exposure to the elements, or straight up execution. Any that refused to go were just simply killed. The mass migration of the Cherokee later became known as the “Trail of Tears” for the inhumane conditions and mass loss of life that occurred on the journey.

Native peoples were forced into complete assimilation: adopting white names, learning English, wearing European dress, forced to give up their lifestyle to settle into a stationary land, convert to Christianity, and much, much more. For a lot of these groups, they were not only being decimated in sheer physical numbers, but their identities and customs and memory were basically being wiped out as well. This comes into play later, as to why certain cultural aspects of Native heritage is so completely important and sacred. More on that in a sec.

Indigenous people then lived on “reservations” designated by the government in western America, around Oklahoma and the like. These reservations were, in other words, where they were legally “allowed” to live and could not leave, and stayed there for a long time. Some tribes and members still live on those reservations, and things can be utterly bleak there. Alcoholism and domestic violence on reservations is a pandemic of its own, as well as poverty and education issues. Acts done by the American government a century prior still have an enormous effect on the people living there today.

Many Natives moved away from reservations when laws were passed in the 20th century to give some freedoms back. Some, like my grandparents’ family, chose to move back to their native ancestral lands in Appalachia, where they were mostly unwelcome by the descendants of the white settlers there. Natives continue to face discrimination to this day, their fight for their ancestral lands all but lost by this point. Indigenous peoples all across the country are still fighting for their rights, for equal treatment, and also for their history and culture to be preserved in the face of ethnic genocide and forced assimilation.

“Stuff means things”: struggling to keep oral traditions alive

In the heat of a debate about this topic on discord, I, in a moment of frustration when I was asked why Choerry wearing beading and feathers or Chuu wearing a “dreamcatcher” necklace when the theme of “wild west” was obvious and apparent, I just blurted out, “stuff means things”. It was a very short way of trying to declare how important these objects meant to me, and I was too overwhelmed to go into further detail at the time.

My grandparents were divorced before I was born, so I didn’t know my grandfather much, but my grandmother instilled both his and her cultures into me growing up. I grew up raised by my mother, so my grandmother’s installation of this side of me was all I had. When I wasn’t with her, I was raised in a family where everyone, except my sister and me, were all-white. Our traditions were typical white southern culture. We had Christmas trees and went to Baptist church. In the autumn and winter, or if I never stepped out into the sun, I could pass as white. My mother would put lemon juice in my hair as a kid to lighten my hair up (does that even work?) to match my more light brunette family, and was afraid that when we went to the beach on family vacations that when I was tan people would think I was adopted because I was “so dark”. My mother was upset when I lost my lighter “baby hair” and my eyes were not blue like the family’s. If it weren’t for having the relationship with my grandmother that I did, I would not have had the opportunity to learn about my heritage or be connected to it in any meaningful manner, and wouldn’t have continued to be involved in it after her death.

The most important thing my grandmother taught me, and she drilled this into me over and over when I spent summers at her house, was that so much — a vast, vast amount — of Native culture across all tribes is passed down orally. There were not exhaustive records being kept in indigenous nations before the settlers came, and after the Indian Removal Act, so much was lost already. Now, many nations are attempting to record their stories and traditions and craftmanships into written history as much as possible, but it still feels like a huge uphill battle. My grandmother was the last of her line, an only surviving child from her own parents, and her birthday wasn’t even recorded. Her parents weren’t even registered as citizens of America and had no records. I can easily (and have done this) hop on ancestry dot com to find the lineage of my white family going back hundreds of years, back before they even came to America as immigrants. But for my Native side, it stops at my grandmother. I only know what I know of her family because of what she told me, from what her parents told her, and what their parents told them, and so on.

When my grandmother would teach me her language, tell stories or legends, or how to make certain foods or items, or teach me about the meaning of these things to our people, she told me over and over until I was sick of hearing it that she was passing this oral knowledge on to me, and that I was the one keeping it alive. The responsibility falls on me to keep it going or let it die out. The stories her grandparents had told her of the forced migration, I knew all of that because she told me. If I don’t pass any of this on to someone else, who will know about our history? Who will I pass the sacred items my grandmother gave to me, and only me because my sister was not interested in that part of her culture growing up, when I die? Will they go into storage somewhere and unearthed years later to be sold to a collector?

“It’s just feathers.”

It’s not just feathers.

Feathers were/are given to members of tribes all across the country for many reasons: mainly to celebrate an event in someone’s life. It could be considered a milestone in your life, an honor bestowed upon you for a courageous or selfless act, signify a marriage, a birth, and even a death. It could be used to show your achievements in war. Feathers are awarded to members of tribes for a variety of reasons, but the biggest factor is that there was a reason it was given to them. They had to earn this honor. Wearing the feathers was a symbol of what you’d achieved in life, or what you’d suffered, and they were worn with honor and solemnity. To wear these feathers in your hair or your headdress was sacred. To wear it as a costume, or an aesthetic, is stripping the meaning from those things.

Even worse, when it is done improperly to make it more “aesthetic”, it becomes an even harder pill to swallow. My grandmother passed down these from her father, among other things such as shoes and handwoven sashes, to me that I still have in a tiny box in safekeeping. Along with baby shoes she had made for me when I was born, and a “dreamcatcher” she’d crafted by hand for me as well. This has utmost importance to me, not only culturally, but because it’s related to my grandmother who was the only person I had in this part of my world. It paints a vibrant history of not only my grandmother’s life, but her parents’ before her. And theirs before them. And so on. It’s as good of an “ancestry dot com” family tree as I will ever get about my family.

About “dreamcatchers” — what we know as “dreamcatchers” (which is not their original name, but for simplicity’s sake we will refer to them as such going forward) originated in a specific tribe known as the Ojibwe, but due to the congregating of many tribes together during the Indian Removal Act, many tribes began sharing and incorporating other cultures into their own once forced into the same spaces to live. Dreamcatchers are actually made to be protective charms resembling spiderwebs. It originated from the legend of the Spider Grandmother/Mother Asibikaashi who is said to protect and care for children. The dreamcatchers are woven like a web so that the Spider Mother can reach children even so far away and protect them from evil, and it is traditional for mothers and grandmothers to craft them for newborns, and for those children to have the same object for their whole life. So not really anything at all to do with “catching dreams” in the end. The name “dreamcatcher” was actually coined by non-natives.

My grandmother had her own dreamcatcher that was made for her by her mother when she was born and she made one for both my sister and me when we were born, too. This is one of the most important things I own, and it’s not as pretty and perfect as the dreamcatchers you can buy in kitschy shops and the like. It doesn’t have gemstones and pretty white yarn and isn’t teal blue. It’s not “aesthetic” enough for the people using it as jewelry or a prop. But to me, it means so much, and most importantly, it has meaning and authenticity that the props do not. The dreamcatcher has also become a precious symbol of unity among various tribes in America.

You made this? …I made this.

When cultural appropriation is brought up, there is often an argument from some well meaning (and not so well meaning) people who say, “but isn’t it good to share culture? Isn’t it good to spread knowledge about your culture to the world? Don’t you want people to know about your people? Why are you hoarding it for yourselves only?”

To this I would ask one simple question: Now that you’ve seen a Loona member in feathers and beads, and now that you’ve seen a dreamcatcher necklace on another, what did you learn about those items from this?

What does this image actually teach you about Native culture?

What I mean is this: I wholeheartedly believe that sharing our culture is a wonderful thing to do. I love when people are genuinely interested in my culture and want to learn about it and even try to immerse themselves in it. But that’s just it, isn’t it? They are learning something. The importance of my grandmother’s feathers and headpieces and shoes and pictures and woven sashes and fans and jewelry… I can tell you about what those mean to me. I can show you. I want you to see its rich history.

But if I hadn’t told you just a few moments ago what this all meant in my upbringing, would you have gleaned all this sacred information from just seeing someone in feathers or a dreamcatcher necklace?

No, and that is precisely the issue, isn’t it? You aren’t learning anything. This instance of cultural appropriation hasn’t taught you anything. They’ve stuck feathers in someone’s hair or plopped some leather straps on them or put them in a necklace because it looked cool and I’m supposed to say “well it’s spreading my culture fair and square, I guess you’re right and I shouldn’t take issue”. You weren’t any more wise about Native culture after you saw it than before. It didn’t teach you anything. What’s the point of sharing my culture if you don’t know the culture afterwards?

Growing up, my grandmother was bullied in excess for wearing traditional headpieces or dress, or handmade items from her mother and grandmother. She was told it was ugly, she was called a savage, told she was uneducated or strange. Her items were insulted and belittled, told it was “hokey shit”. To the people around her, she was some weird pagan who didn’t believe in technology or progress and was “stuck in the past”.

But today, people see these symbols that used to get my grandmother beaten by boys at her school as cute necklaces or cute headpieces that they can go music festival hopping in. They can stick it on a “sexy indian” costume and wear it for Halloween.

Now you get people who have this romanticized vision of Natives and “indians”. To once again quote Ellis from her video linked above:

“Pocahontas is hyper sexualized, she moves animalisticly, falls in love with the first white guy she sees, talks to the animals and communes with the spirits of things like rocks and… trees.”

It’s all so watered down and is meant to invoke some sort of dreamy, exotic fantasy for non-Native people. I surely don’t commune with rocks and trees. The culture of Natives isn’t meant to be used to invoke a dreamy, festival fashion, exotic and hippie one-with-nature concept like it comes across in the concept teasers.

The meaning behind these items have been stripped, the sacred side of it has been washed down to being an accessory. At the end of the music festival, you can take off your non-eagle feathers and moccasins and dreamcatchers and go about your normal life — but my grandmother couldn’t take off her Nativeness at the end of the day. What my grandmother and ancestors were forbidden to do under penalty of beatings or death, someone can freely do now without even understanding the deeply coveted meaning it holds. There is something heartbreaking about that.

On another side of the argument, one might say that the dreamcatcher you see on Chuu’s neck doesn’t much resemble what an authentic native symbol would, and that as such shouldn’t it be considered it’s own cultural item now? Chuu and Choerry and Olivia’s hair feathers aren’t the traditional eagle feathers used in native dress. So wouldn’t it now be considered to be it’s own thing, evolved from native culture into a completely unique aspect of “festival” culture — invoking Woodstock, the 60s, Coachella and the like?

I think this is a mistake, and I believe this is where erasure of meanings and importance of these items really hits home. These “fashions” were crafted originally from Native culture, and through making it more palatable to a consumer audience for the purpose of making money and selling fashion and accessories, making it “prettier”, it has completely lost all original meaning. Now, people associate these items with festival culture, hippies, bohemian style, and others. It is not connected in any way back to where it came from, and the more dreamcatchers and feathers become twisted and changed into something unrecognizable, the further it loses all original significance, erasing the Native influence that much more. If you see a pair of pink gemstone and costume feather earrings and your immediate thought is “Coachella” and not “Native” then therein lies the problem. Therein lies the idea of culture being slowly appropriated for its own use, erased, original meaning be damned.

For me, these are not fashions. These are a part of heritage and history, and not simply a fashion style.

Native girl in Korea: or, why would you put THAT on that snack bag?

Native culture is already handled poorly by non-indigenous people in my home country of America, but in other countries it isn’t really handled much better. A lot of countries get their ideas of Natives from old Westerns, those films about cowboys and pioneers and the wild, wild west. I thought from all these teasers that BBC was definitely going for a “cowboys and indians” concept — it’s not hard to connect two dots when a country that gets its info about Native culture from Westerns is or isn’t trying to convey Native cultural elements when the cowboy hats and ties and holsters are also present. Now that it has become apparent BBC is going for some sort of “festival” fashion aspect, it hits even stranger.

I work part-time, teaching at a Korean kindergarten. Last year, my coworker dressed up as one of those “sexy indian girl” costumes, although toned down on the “sexy” for the kids. She had the upright feather in her hair, had the moccasins and war paint and all of it… and this woman had studied in America for 6 years. I remember my heart dropping to my chest when I saw her show up for work like that. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to rock the boat. Who would have sided with me anyways? Who would have understood the disappointment? Would I be told I was just being too sensitive and it was a non-issue? Or worse yet… it was honoring Native culture? It was actually “sharing” my culture.

A few months ago, we were holding a “pajama day” event at the school for the kids. The concept is simple! Come to school in pajamas, do some sleepover activities, tell scary stories in sleeping bags, and make… dreamcatchers?

I… was going to have to make paper craft dreamcatchers with my kids. My throat plummeted in to my stomach. I told my boss that I was Native, and that this is a little hard for me to get behind.

“Why? Isn’t it sharing your culture then?”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, condensing my whole argument above to my boss who didn’t seem to have any ill intentions and wasn’t open to changing the itenerary.

“Dreamcatchers don’t have anything to do with pajama parties. They mean something…I can’t teach the complex meaning behind this object in 15 minutes to five year olds trying to eat glue the whole time.”

Of course I didn’t win against my boss. She told me just… do it. Just don’t rock the boat. We made the dreamcatchers. It was an ugly, tacky thing. Complete with rhinestones, pipe cleaners, costume feathers and construction paper. As I stood there holding the thing in my hand I felt like a part of me was being humiliated. I was forced to make something disrespectful to my own culture, when it would have been the MOST opportune time to actually teach them something! I could have made a whole lesson out of it! I could have shared the important history to them. I could have educated them on a part of myself. But I was told no, just make paper nightmare and move on.

Who cares if it means something to you? I wanted to groan and throw it in the trash, but we had to take a “group pic” with the kids all holding them up. I gritted my teeth and tried to bear it. I felt like a total fucking clown.

Then, just two days ago, right after the debacle with Loona and the teasers started, I was getting a snack from the local convenience store and came across this:

As if the little stereotype-walking cartoon character wasn’t enough, the name of the food is 인디안밥. Literally “indian food”. They’re corn crisps. Corn. Crisps. I won’t even begin to get into the complex issues surrounding the name “Indian” relating to indigenous people. I just sort of sighed and got my snack and left. I could post about it on twitter but what else what I going to do? Who was I going to tell? What good would it do? What would change?

When Native culture was used in these situations, it was for either an aesthetic, or an insensitive way to sell a product. You didn’t learn anything about the culture when consuming these products. What did you learn about Native culture from the corn chips? Or the paper plate dreamcatcher? Or the sexy Halloween costume? Or the necklace, the hair feathers and beading, the poorly blurred picture that showed a company behind it was aware of the issue but wanted to stay silent hoping it would just go away?

Intent matters

One of the most important topics I wanted to touch on in this essay is about intent. How does intent matter, especially when it comes to cultural appropriation? I, personally, think this is vitally important. Did BBC plan to offend anyone with this styling? I highly doubt it. Of many acts of cultural appropriation taken in kpop, was the intent ever harm or ridicule? Most of them, no. Most of the time, the intention is that it is aesthetically pleasing, it looks cool, it’s pretty, it’s “exotic” (sigh), etc. Usually, these acts are used as a way to elevate style or make something beautiful. I can see why some people would think this is a compliment, and in some ways, it can be: Someone thinks aspects of my culture, even when bastardized into something more palatable to non-native society as a whole, is beautiful. There is a certain amount of pride one can take in that, no matter how sour it tastes as a whole. No, it doesn’t make it okay, but I think that it can help build a bridge to understanding from those who don’t understand the issues, and to compromise.

If the history and significance and importance of objects sacred to Native culture can be expressed when used in Loona concepts, I can get behind it. If it’s done well. But at the point we are at now, when it is simply used as an accessory, it is not enough. It doesn’t harbor the history and rich heritage embedded within it that I learned from my grandmother. It doesn’t tell of the struggles and triumphs of Native people. It isn’t an insult, but in a way it is still insulting.

If the intention is not mean or cruel or dismissive, it can be salvaged. This, too, can be salvaged. We can come to an understanding and use it as an opportunity for good representation if BBC gives an acknowledgment and apology for not using these things correctly. It can lead to others becoming interested in what it actually means. There can be a good resolution to this issue.

Let me be clear, harassing someone will never get them to see or come to your side. I want to be firm in asking for acknowledgement and apologies from BBC, but I am not going to harass a stylist who is ignorant of a culture, I want them to want to learn, and want to do better. If the intent was not cruel and demeaning, rather it was innocent but very ignorant, then we can work towards an understanding together with (hopefully) empowering results. The plights of Natives are already depressingly unknown in America, Canada, and other indigenous lands. I’m not naive enough to believe other countries would be more knowledgeable as well. I think this is a good opportunity to have an open dialogue, where people can learn and not feel stupid for not already knowing. That can lead to intense defensiveness on the other side, which will not bring anyone around to understanding these points any more than before.

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Conclusion: to move on better than before

Forgiveness is what I choose to believe is imperative, but at the same time, not saying something isn’t an option. I can’t accept being told to just “let it go” and say that it’s nothing to get so worked up over. I love Loona with every fiber of my being and don’t want them to disband, cancel the comeback, delay things, go on hiatus, any of that. I want them to have a successful comeback like everyone else! But if I don’t call this like I see it as a fan, non-fans surely will. And ten-fold. I don’t want BBC to stay ignorant to these things so they can put members on the metaphorical chopping block from other fandoms. That, and this is important to me as a person. I am both Native and a fan of Loona. I can have both, and I’m not going to simply be quiet about it or pick a side. I won’t accept that the company seems aware of the issues but remains silent. All I ask for is acknowledgement and an action plan on how they plan to do better going forward, and if some things can be changed before the release to ease the hurt.

There’s a great opportunity on the horizon right now for Native culture to be spotlighted in a positive way. I hope that this can help change some minds of people who weren’t aware of the significance of these things, and that this can help us work towards a happy solution for all parties and let Loona have the best and most successful comeback ever.