Post #75002 by emspace on Sat, Feb 7, 2004 4:04 PM

As my old digital audio instructor once said, "Just because something is politically correct doesn't mean it's wrong".

I collect Coco Joes and mugs. I'm not sure if that makes me a hypocrite, but I am down with Sneakytiki on this one. Maybe it's because I live in a place where there are a lot of Native people, my wife is working for a Native band, and ridiculous plastic Taiwanese "totem poles" are still openly flogged to tourists.

Maybe others would like to weigh in: does having Coco Joes or mugs feel the same to you as, say, sporting a Cleveland Indians jersey? It doesn't to me, and I'm trying to figure out why...for one thing, If we know Hawaiian history, it was a Queen who broke the kapus, causing a general concensus that the old religion was not to be followed any more, and that the idols were simply figures made of wood. Regarding renewed practices of traditional religion, it seems that Native peoples are just as capable of revisionism as the dominant culture - witness a re-adopting of some of the old ways, with a glossing over or willful forgetting of the bad parts, e.g. intertribal warfare and blood-feud, cannibalism, slavery, incest, etc. Plenty of chest-beating guilt on the part of the dominant culture, very little of it from the indigenous peoples. I don't think I'll live to see the Haida apolgizing to the Salish for their constant slave-raiding, not to mention the horrible practice of killing slaves at potlatch to show how wealthy one is.

My point, if I have one - we have a long way to go before we really understand each other's cultures, and while we are doing that work, maybe naming a car after a religious figure is not such a hot idea.

aloha, em.