It’s Johnny Depp’s birthday today.

I’m very fond of his work with Tim Burton (the bloke on the right, there) despite my deep discomfort with the culturally-appropriating and othering choices that have been made in other films he’s been in — the Pirates of the Caribbean films most egregiously. If he does indeed have Cherokee ancestry, a claim which First Nations activists often question due to his not being listed with any of the federally recognized* Cherokee Nations, then he really should use his star status to pressure the directors, producers, screenwriters, costumers et al. he works with to refrain from slandering Native peoples, and from casting non-Native actors to play Native characters.

I mean, as far as I’m concerned, everyone with sufficient Hollywood cachet to make demands (whether they work in front of the camera or behind it) should refuse to participate in films that are racist, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-polytheist, anti-atheist, sexist, cissexist, heterosexist, ageist, ableist, and so on. But yes, I do also think that if you identify with any demographic that’s marginalized in Western culture, you have more of an obligation to not just give people a pass when you have the authority to hold them accountable.**

wearediverse:

oh. okay then, dearie. :P

where’s that quote from?

Gotta admit, I’m curious as to the source of the aardvark quote, too…

* The problem with distinguishing Native people who are enrolled in a federally-recognized tribal nation from those who aren’t is right there in the phrase “federally-recognized” — meaning, of course, recognized by the United States federal government in the form of the notorious Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Yes, they still call it that. In 2012.) The BIA routinely denies recognition to extant tribal groups who can document their history so long as White property owners who stand to either lose real estate, face economic competition, or both, argue “persuasively” enough against recognition. And that’s not even getting into all the Native populations who can’t meet BIA standards of proof because Whites destroyed records and/or exterminated a high enough percentage of Native populations — or because the BIA itself took Native children away from their families to be re-educated and adopted into White families and thus created a break in the passing down of their tribe’s cultural traditions.

Then there are people like me, who probably would be “federally-recognized” in Canada, but because I and my parents and grandparents were all U.S. citizens, and neither the Métis nor (unless there was intermarriage with another, border-spanning tribe or tribes which we haven’t discovered via genealogical research) any of the currently-recognized Canadian First Nations my ancestors belonged to are recognized by the BIA, I fall outside both U.S. and Canadian definitions for recognition. Members of tribal nations south of the U.S. border — from Mexico down to the southernmost tip of South America — face the same refusal of recognition under U.S. law.

** Having the authority to hold others accountable for their prejudiced speech and behavior creates an affirmative obligation to do so, in my view. This does not apply to people who lack the situational authority to correct the offending person, though some brave individuals may do so anyway; I would definitely not argue that anyone has an obligation to challenge bigoted speech or behavior from, say, a supervisor who can fire them, or a police officer who’s just pulled them over. Personal safety comes first.