Yet another celebrity is feeling the internet backlash for appropriating a Native American headdress: this time it’s hockey legend Wayne Gretzky’s wife, Janet. Her Instagram photo features her four daughters in headdresses, as reported by Vincent Schilling in India Country Media Today. In recent years, Gwen Stefani and Pharrell Williams have also prompted an outcry from tribes for using as a fashion prop what can be a deeply symbolic or ceremonial item (both celebrities later apologized).
What’s the big deal?
The harm of spiritual appropriation can go far beyond just being offensive. Near Mt. Shasta, New Age types come to ceremoniously dump the cremated ashes of a loved one into a spring. The spring is considered highly sacred by the Winnemem tribe; they visit what they believe to be the place of their creation just once a year. Now the tribal members must clean human bones and ash out of their drinking water, as reported in Indian Country Media Today and illustrated in a film from the Sacred Land Film Project.
Many believe that when they don a Pocahontas Halloween costume or tribal-themed headdress, they’re honoring tribal culture or simply adopting what’s resonant, beautiful, and meaningful for themselves. (See Chanel’s defense of its 2013/2014 Paris-Dallas Metiers d’Art show in Elle). Millennial hippies at Coachella are probably not dreaming of genocide when they don feathers, beads, and face paint.
Stealing when there’s little left
Yet these acts take an object or practice out of context and strip it of its meaning. And too much heritage of Native American tribes has been stripped already,
Been caught stealing:
tribal spiritual misappropriation
by JoAnne Dyer