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Native American Culture Summary

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On Wednesday, April 4th, Dr. Adrienne Keene presented Native Appropriations, Indigenous Social Media, and Responding to Racism in Graff Main Hall. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and an Assistant Professor of American and Ethnic Studies at Brown University, Dr. Keene is well established as an authority to speak on this subject. To introduce the presentation, she started by showing the audience the first page of Google Image results for “Native American”, then explained some of the problems clearly displayed on screen. One of her highlights on this was that so much of this search result - and so much of Native American representation as a whole- is old, historic, and male. After introducing this, she discussed some of her reasons to do this work, quoting James Baldwin’s words, “If I love you, I have to make you aware of the things you do not see.” …show more content…

She described how, contrary to the one-sided historic stereotypes presented, there are 566+ federally recognized tribes demonstrating how complex and multifaceted Native identities are. Next, she defined cultural appropriation and showed how it significantly harms Native American People economically, morally, and culturally. She then went over her questions for campus communities, and suggested several ways campuses can help support Native American Students and reject white settler-colonialism dominance. One of her recommendations was free/reduced tuition for students from tribes who were forced away from the land that the university now occupies. In conclusion, she went over again the reasons she does this work, powerfully saying that “part of owning your privilege is working to dismantle

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