The last few days/months/years have brought a lot of new folks to me, my work, and this ever-aging blog. I wanted to take a minute to introduce myself to anyone who may be new here, and re-introduce myself to anyone who may have jumped in at any point along the last 14(!) years of Native Appropriations and my journey. I decided to write this as a snarky Q&A where I am both the asker and the answerer because why not?
Who are you?!
Hi! My name is Adrienne Keene. I’m a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, and also Settler/White (specifically Armenian/German/Irish/English/Welsh). I’m a scholar, researcher, educator, writer, podcaster, and more recently a visual artist. Up until January I was a professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies, where my research focuses on Native students navigating the college process and the role of higher ed in Native communities, as well as cultural appropriation and Native representations.
What is Native Appropriations? How did it start?
This space where we find ourselves is my blog, Native Appropriations. I started the blog when I was 23, as a first year doctoral student. I had just moved to the East Coast from California, where I had been lucky to spend the previous seven years surrounded by a large, diverse Native community on my undergraduate campus, where I then worked after graduation. I arrived at grad school, and suddenly I was faced with overwhelming ignorance on Native peoples like nothing I had ever experienced before. My classmates told me to my face they thought Indians didn’t exist anymore or that they had never met a Native person in their lives. They didn’t have any knowledge or understanding of the issues or communities I cared about, and didn’t care to learn.
One day in Urban Outfitters, surrounded by the worst culturally appropriative BS I’d ever seen, something clicked. I realized that the reason my classmates and faculty didn’t know contemporary Native peoples existed, or care about our modern struggles and triumphs was partially because the only images they ever saw were things like this crud in Urban Outfitters, or any of the other awful stereotypes we see on a daily basis. To them, Native peoples were these decontextualized stereotypes without any relation to actual living humans, and that, I decided, was a problem. So I put up a Facebook note, back when people did that, and asked my friends to start sending me things for a “project.” I honestly never thought anyone was going to read the blog. I thought it would be a place for me to catalog, mostly. A repository of images and products and things that I found hurtful, and place for me to find the words to say why. But obviously I was wrong, in the best ways, and it’s grown into something I never could have dreamed.
But why a blog?
In the 2010s everyone had a blog! It was actually pretty glorious. There was a blog for every niche interest or community imaginable. You could always find someone’s elaborate thoughts on truly anything within a few clicks. Folks posted their elaborate daily outfits in front of garage doors. We all coded HTML by hand. I knew way too much about random strangers’ lives to the point that I actually miss them and wonder how they are all these years later. So starting a blog wasn’t a rare or weird thing back then. Having one in 2024 might be though?
Where did the name “Native Appropriations” come from?
The name came from me smushing together “Native”/”Native American” and “cultural appropriation.” I didn’t really think a lot about it, nor did I think it would become my “brand.” I had been an anthropology major as an undergrad and cultural appropriation was a thing that we had talked about in some of my classes. I also was entering an existing internet conversation, there was a growing cultural appropriation discourse happening. My (not-yet, but now) friend Jessica Metcalfe was covering Native fashion and plenty of appropriation on her blog, Beyond Buckskin, an anonymous person named “K” (who recently revealed themselves to me all these years later–made me so happy!) was running a tumblr called “My culture is not a trend,” as well as a few other folks.
If you’re interested in more of the origin story and/or want a more in-depth discussion about what Native appropriation/cultural appropriation is, why it matters, and more, we have a whole All My Relations (the podcast I co-created–more on that in a minute) episode about it: Season 1, Episode 7: Native Appropriations.
If you were only writing about cultural appropriation, how come if I scroll back there are only long posts about you and your life, instead of posts about misrepresentations/Native Appropriation?
For the first five or so years of the blog I was primarily responding to instances of cultural appropriation in popular culture–writing about the phenomenon of “hipster headdresses” over and over and over, writing about Indian mascots, cowboy and Indian parties, brands using fake Native imagery in advertising and logos, bad movies like The Lone Ranger, analyzing TV shows, on and on.
Then at some point I started including more personal essays as well. Essays about responding to racism in my grad school classrooms, cringey missives about dating, and later even more personal pieces about really tough things like PMDD, cervical cancer, and predatory “famous” men in our communities. Through it all I went from a grad student, to a postdoc, to a faculty member, and now…whatever I’m going to be, and since I had been so open about who I was, I felt it important to share all parts of what it meant to be a Native person. The blog went from being very active in the early years, to nearly dormant for the last five or so. Mostly because on the tenure-track hustle I was (sadly) trying to prioritize writing that would “count” for my tenure process. So for the last couple of years I used the blog as a space for when I needed to post something publicly, and those tended to be more personal updates.
Your academic research is largely on Native students in college, So why did you decide to keep writing about Native representations as you moved through academia?
I’ve always operated the blog under an ethos of “Consenting to learn in public”–the idea that I don’t know everything, but am learning publicly along with all of you. It means that I’ve always tried to be open to criticism when I misstep, offer corrections, apologies, resources I’ve found helpful, and hope that others will join me on that learning journey as well. Learning is a messy, complicated, nonlinear process, and I hope to model how we are able to extend each other grace and understanding as folks embark on their own learning journeys. So while many academics might blog about their particular area of research expertise, I have always considered this blog a side hustle that I was actively learning along with my readers. Interestingly, it then morphed into my research, and I’ve been publishing lately on a big survey of Native people on Native appropriation, which has been really fascinating and rewarding.
If I’ve never actually read your blog before, where should I start? What should I know as I read the posts?
The biggest disclaimer I want to offer as you delve into the archives is that these posts are old. The conversation and language around these topics has (thank goodness!) evolved in the last decade, so some of these posts might seem a little outdated, naive, or my voice might sound young–because I was. I believe very strongly that we should never be afraid to be seen trying, so I want the blog to live as an archive, and think that some of the pieces are still very relevant. I don’t expect you to agree with all of these, I don’t even agree with old me a lot of the time. Oh also don’t be alarmed if the formatting is wonky or pictures are missing or links are broken, sometimes that happens on relics of the ancient internet.
- My first big post to go viral was “But Why Can’t I Wear a Hipster Headdress?” (I love this one because I was so hesitant/unsure of my arguments back then)
- Then there was the open letter phase, A Letter to the Pocahotties and Indian Warriors on Halloween, and Dear Christina Fallin. (It’s wild to me how much folks argued with me about these letters when they seem so obvious now, look at the comments)
- There were like 8 posts about the Lone Ranger with Johnny Depp as Tonto, including one called “Why Tonto Matters”.
- Lots about Halloween Costumes.
- and then more recently (2018, ha) a post about Sephora’s “Starter Witch Kit” and the appropriation of white sage in particular.
Those are just off top of my head, feel free to jump around and explore. Folks who’ve been reading a long time, if there are others you still resonate with, feel free to share in the comments!
What about the other things you do? Your podcast? Your book? Your art?
I’m so glad you asked! I also am proud of the work I’ve done on the All My Relations Podcast over three seasons, where I co-hosted with Swinomish and Tulalip photographer Matika Wilbur. I published a book in 2021 called Notable Native People: 50 Indigenous Leaders, Dreamers, and Changemakers from Past and Present—a book beautifully illustrated by CHamoru artist Ciara Sana featuring short profiles of 50 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian folks from history and today, covering a wide swath of identities and life paths. These two projects were an outgrowth of the realization that we couldn’t just tear down misrepresentations all the time, we needed to give folks some nuanced, complex, beautiful representations to replace the bad. Right now I’m hard at work on two, maybe three(?) additional book projects that hopefully will become real in the next few years. I recently have also turned toward visual art as an additional medium, which has been very healing and fun.
You’ve said you grew up away from your community? And are White? Who are you to speak on anything Native?
(I’m sad I have to include this tbh)
Through it all, I’ve tried to be very open about who I am. I am an enrolled tribal citizen, but anyone reading old posts will notice I talk about my whiteness often, and from the beginning of the blog was clear about my own positionality. Part of having white privilege is needing to work incessantly to dismantle it, and that’s part of what I hope I’m doing with this project and calling out white supremacy in action. I also talk about growing up surrounded by non-Natives, the ways settler colonial policies have impacted my own family through removal, boarding schools, land flooding, and more, and I talk about my own journey of reconnection, now over 23 years in the making. I write about it because I think it’s important to understand that these ideas and opinions I share are mine, and I represent only one Native perspective informed by my own life experiences. I also don’t want others who have similar stories to feel the shame that comes with having no control over the way you were raised or not knowing/feeling “enough.” My story is a shared one for many Native folks, so I don’t want anyone to feel alone or like it’s too late to build a connection to their nation. I also talk about the whole journey on an All My Relations episode as well, if you want the long version.
I think the conversations online lately about what “reconnecting” means and entails have shifted the meaning of the phrase in ways I’m not comfortable with, so want to offer a caveat here. Reconnecting often now is taken to mean someone who “discovered” an ancient ancestor many generations back, maybe they know the tribal nation, maybe they don’t, and immediately tried to monetize it or speak with full authority on all Native topics without seeing reconnecting as the action verb it is. That’s not me. I grew up knowing I was Cherokee, having a Cherokee Grandma who grew up on allotment land and went to Indian boarding school, and visiting my Cherokee relatives in Oklahoma. But through generations of colonization, our family lost a lot. A lot of land, a lot of knowledge, a lot of language, a lot of connection–nearly everything. I’ve made it my life’s mission to reclaim that connection, and am immensely proud of the community I’ve built over the last two decades and what I’ve been able to learn, while also looking forward to the future and knowing there are lifetimes of work still ahead.
I am very careful about where I speak with authority. I write primarily about representations because that’s my lane, and that’s an experience that impacts me deeply as a Native person living off her homelands. I am surrounded by these images and see how they shape non-Native perceptions of Native people, daily. I write about Native students in college because I was a Native student in college, and then have been on university campuses firsthand for the last 18 years. I don’t write about Cherokee spirituality, ceremony, or cultural knowledge, because that is knowledge I don’t have authority to speak on, nor would I want to (because not everything belongs on the internet or in an academic journal). Throughout my writing and other work like the podcast I try to lift up others and center other Native voices, and try to always give credit where credit is due. I’m sure I’ve unintentionally overstepped at some points, but know that I try to be very conscious of the space I occupy and the limits of my knowledge.
Part of what stereotypes do is they collapse the immense diversity of Indian Country down into one flattened version of what an “Indian” is. So one aspect of resisting these stereotypes is showing that there is no one “Native” anything, and that our communities contain multitudes of opinions, perspectives, experiences, cultures, languages, on and on. I’m just one of millions.
So what’s next with Native Appropriations? What does the future hold?
This is largely the whole point of this long post! Congrats on making it this far! After many years of laying dormant, I’m seeing a need to revisit a lot of these conversations from the last 15 years for a new generation and new audience. We’ve made such huge advances in the last few years that I think it’s important to reflect on how far we’ve come, but also to recognize a lot of the BS we were dealing with in the 2010s hasn’t gone away. Part of the purpose of the blog was for me to create resources I wished I had as a young person, so hopefully the posts can still be useful for folks today. I miss the community we had in the early days of the blog, and I miss writing in this medium regularly and using that part of my analytic brain. I also want to uplift all of the cool stuff happening in Native TV, fashion, art, film, and more.
Sooo all that is to say, stay tuned, the blog is coming back in a new form, very soon!! Eeee! 👀
Where can I find more about you and your work?
My personal website is adriennekeene.com!
If you made it through all this you’re amazing and I love you–can’t wait to talk more soon!
With elder millennial 2010s internet love,
AK