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The conflict over cultural appropriation, like the conflict over the Black Hills, centers around Native peoples' sovereignty. But unlike land disputes, the conflict over cultural appropriation clearly emphasizes the nature of Native peoples' sovereignty as both political and cultural. 45 Many Native people today speak of the fact that cultural and intellectual sovereignty undergird their continuing efforts to maintain political sovereignty. Robert Allan Warrior argues, for example, that Indian people need to develop an "intellectual sovereignty" that allows them to work both within traditional systems and outside of them to evaluate the multiple experiences they have had as distinct nations and cultures within a colonial structure.46 Similarly, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn's argument for tribal "jurisdiction" over the "storytelling of Indian America" is premised upon the need for American Indian people to have an "intellectual voice with which to enter into America's important dialogues.,,47 Professor Cook-Lynn observes that "[m]uch as the title to Indian land is still held by the white American government, the major Indian story is held in non-Indian enclaves.48 As Cook-Lynn asserts, nobody really cares what Indians think about any particular current national or global issue.49 The "place" of Indians is in a mythical past, painted in cartoons like Pocahontas, John Wayne westerns, or the plethora of western and romance novels that capitalize on stereotypes about Indians as either "noble" or "bloodthirsty" savages.

In reality, however, "[t]he intersection of modern and historic identity is a critical issue for contemporary Native American people."so After a series of federal policies designed to dismantle tribal cultures and force the assimilation of Native people, there is a pervasive idea among Native people that cultural restoration is essential to the task of building strong Nations in the future.51 For example, in the context of repatriation, Native Hawaiian leader, Edward Halealoha Ayau remarks that "[r]estoring the ancestral foundation through repatriation ... will spiritually clear the path to restoration of Ka Lahui Hawai'i (the Hawaiian Nation).,,52 As Ayau asserts, for Native people, culture is an inseparable aspect of their daily existence, and the survival of Native nations depends upon cultural maintenance.

Although its ‘‘roots’’ in an organic metaphor for culture may be unfortunate given my discussion of Clifford (1988), the concept of hybridity is useful in clarifying dynamics of appropriation under transculturation, understood here as a historically specific condition. Kraidy (2002) discusses hybridity in the context of cultural globalization, focusing on its potential for international and intercultural communication studies. Despite problems with prior uses of the concept, Kraidy sees no ‘‘credible substitute to characterize the dual forces of globalization and localization, cohesion and dispersal, disjuncture and mixture, that capture transnational and transcultural dialectics’’ (p. 332). Kraidy warns against the importation of hybridity into communication studies as a merely ‘‘descriptive device, i.e. describing the local reception of global media texts as a site of cultural mixture’’ (p. 317). Instead of understanding hybridity as the product of local–global interactions, ‘‘hybridity needs to be understood as a communicative practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic arrangements’’ (p. 317). Kraidy’s approach highlights ‘‘the mutually constitutive interplay and overlap of cultural, economic and political forces in international communication processes’’ while positing ‘‘the relationship between structure and agency as a dialectical articulation whose results are not preordained’’ (p. 333). Following Kraidy (2002), transculturation is not only distinct from cultural exchange in that multiple cultures and multiple acts of appropriation are involved but it also retains the implications of unequal power of cultural dominance and exploitation while acknowledging the radically different nature of appropriation in the global–local contexts of transnational capitalism. Transculturation highlights, in ways that cultural dominance and exploitation do not, the hybridity of cultural forms and, following Clifford (1988), the lack of ‘‘authenticity,’’ ‘‘purity,’’ and ‘‘essence’’ in the elements being appropriated and in the appropriations themselves. The point, however, is not to return to a pluralist conception of power, or to pretend that the implications discussed under cultural dominance and exploitation no longer apply. Transculturation and hybridity are as inescapable as cultural appropriation itself—an ‘‘always already’’ condition of contemporary culture. Although specific acts of transcultural appropriation vary in the degree of choice involved, for most individuals and cultures today, the condition of transculturation is an involuntary one. The case of Hopi kachina dolls produced for consumption by tourists and collectors of indigenous arts from the southwestern United States (mentioned earlier under cultural exploitation) demonstrates the international and transcultural contexts in which even seemingly ‘‘domestic’’ appropriations occur. These products are shaped by the domestic and international market in Native arts, including commodification of Western fantasies about Native Americans; by the efforts of Hopi and other Native groups to establish economic viability in the U.S. economy; and by the dialectic of cultural assimilation and cultural survival. Some kachina dolls (and numerous other Native art forms) are not only made by non-Natives but also produced outside the United States, adding an international component of both cultural and labor exploitation to the kachina doll trade. ‘‘Imitation’’ kachina dolls abound, leading to a heavy emphasis on authenticity by dealers in Native arts. However, the creation of ‘‘hybrid’’ kachina dolls (as well as potentially hybrid forms of traditional katsina figures), such as those incorporating nontraditional materials, even by‘‘traditional Native artists,’’ complicates notions of purity and authenticity. In a context in which hybridity is inescapable and in which colonized peoples necessarily appropriate aspects of other, often dominating, cultures, ‘‘cultural or artistic ‘authenticity’ has as much to do with an inventive present as with a past, its objectification, preservation, or revival’’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 222). This ‘‘inventive present’’ includes the (involuntary) condition of transculturation as well as the appropriative tactics used by subordinated cultures, few of which could be considered pure. Even if their presence originates from cultural dominance, pickup trucks, country music, rap, and rodeo are a part of tribal life in the southwestern United States along with katsinas, corn pollen, and eagle feathers—not only as cultural impositions or evidence of assimilation but also as part of the ongoing dynamics of culture, identity, survival, and resistance. Even a seemingly random teepee at a roadside Native American arts outlet—oddly placed, an object more appropriate for the Great Plains and its tribes than the Southwest, serving to cue the Western image of ‘‘the Indian’’ more than to represent any particular tribal identity or heritage—cannot be dismissed a priori as alien, inauthentic, and nothing more than a ploy to lure in ignorant tourists (though it is). Its (in)authenticity is more complex than an organic or primitivist view of culture can accommodate, and its dismissal as inauthentic obscures the cultural dynamics of a living people as much as its alien presence. Stereotypes perpetuated about Native Americans via Hollywood (including teepees as a Native American universal) are complicit in the subordination and exploitation of Native peoples, but they also constitute part of the lived experiences of those peoples, experiences that are never determined in advance by the political economy of their representation by the dominant culture and that can serve to provide forms of agency (e.g., possibilities for reappropriation) not otherwise available. Appropriations in such transcultural contexts—involving multiple Southwestern tribes with varying degrees of traditional and assimilated practices as well as the descendants of Spanish, Anglo, and Mormon colonizers, using a means of habitation employed by tribes of the Great Plains to attract tourists off a highway paved with rock taken from a Hopi sacred site, buzzing with cars (some with indigenous names such as Cherokee, Pontiac, and Touareg) carrying tourists not only from Phoenix and Los Angeles but also from Sao Paolo, Berlin, and Tokyo, who are reading guidebooks to the region distributed by transnational media conglomerates and who just might purchase a Kokopelli t-shirt or kachina doll—articulates not only a dizzying array of factors, none determinant, but also possibilities for a variety of potentially effective agencies. These appropriations and agencies are inauthentic but perhaps thrive precisely because of such inauthenticity. This is not a world of autonomy, equality, and genuine pluralism but of domination, struggle, survival, and resistance; one which can be better understood via hybridity and indigenization and in which concepts such as purity, authenticity, and continuity can do as much to perpetuate (neo)- colonial relations as to overcome them (Clifford, 1988). At the same time, however, concepts like transculturation and hybridity can be deployed to delegitimize (legitimate) claims of cultural ownership by subordinated groups, potentially perpetuating (illegitimate) acts of cultural exploitation and thereby questioning whether transculturation should supplant cultural domination and exploitation as valid types of cultural appropriation. The bind here is that although cultural essence and its attendant traits (singular, bounded, static, and proprietary) perpetuate primitivist, organic, and static conceptions of culture (especially with regards to indigenous cultures) and enable exploitative commodifications, many of the same assumptions inhere in arguments for the rights of colonized cultures to oppose exploitation and to practice, perpetuate, and (re)claim control over their culture (e.g., Whitt, 1995). Hence, as mentioned above, many cultural critics draw parallels between the theft of indigenous lands and the theft of indigenous culture—a rhetorically useful but nevertheless conceptually problematic analog. Transculturation as an ‘‘always already’’ of cultural existence Whereas many of the conceptualizations of transculturation and related concepts (hybridity, indigenization) are grounded in the particular conditions of transnational capitalism, the critique of the very concepts of culture and appropriation that undergird the first three types of appropriation can be extended beyond the contemporary condition to previous eras. That is, transculturation questions whether the conception of culture as singular, bounded essence has ever had empirical validity or conceptual coherence. Transculturation, as conceived here, calls not only for an updating of the understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics but also for a radical reconceptualization of culture itself: as conjunctural, relational, or dialogic; as constituted by, not merely engaged in, appropriative relations; and as an ongoing process of absorption and transformation rather than static configurations of practices. Transculturation is not, however, a neoliberal licensing of cultural imperialism or an embracing of the radical indeterminacy and antimaterialism of some postmodern theories of culture. Transculturation questions many of the assumptions undergirding cultural dominance and exploitation, but it remains oriented toward the material dimensions and implications of cultural practices and sensitive to the complex dynamics of disproportionate power. Transculturation identifies forces of cultural homogenization and highlights the influential role of economic, political, military, and other forms of power while also recognizing how cultural appropriation can be constitutive of cultural particularity and agency. The ongoing imposition of the essentialist view of culture embedded in the first three types of appropriation onto various others (marginalized and/or colonized peoples) may constitute the kind of ‘‘epistemic violence’’ critiqued by Spivak (1988). The history of Navajo weaving demonstrates the validity of transculturation’s conception of culture and appropriation in situations prior to the current globalized era. Weaving has long been a central part of Navajo (Dine´) culture, and this continues today as Navajo weavers prepare rugs for display and sale in museums, Native arts outlets, and trading posts on or near the Navajo Nation, and other uses. However, although a particular idea of ‘‘authentic’’ Navajo weaving (in terms of materials, techniques, and patterns) affects the value attached to such weavings, the past 150 years of Navajo weaving have included a wide range of materials and patterns, born of both the conditions under which the Navajo have survived and Navajo inventiveness. A brief review of the recent Eyedazzlers Project (n.d.) and related research by Sheri Burnham (2005) concerning the Germantown period in Navajo weaving and its recent revival illustrates the complex cultural intersections, conditions, and agencies involved in acts of appropriation and the limitations of an essentialist view of culture. In 1863, the U.S. Army forced the defeated Navajo on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Bereft of their sheep and unable to grow crops or otherwise support themselves, Navajo women began unraveling Army-issue blankets and reweaving the materials (Burnham, 2005). Eventually, Germantown yarn from Philadelphia was provided to the Navajo via the railroad. This finely spun and brightly colored yarn was very different from their traditional handspun and naturally dyed yarn, contributing to the development of a distinct style of weavings referred to as Germantowns or Eyedazzlers. The use of Germantown yarn and related styles of weaving continued for approximately 40 years before a return to more traditional patterns and materials. For some, Germantowns represented a loss of authenticity and tradition; a return to earlier styles was driven in part by efforts to market more traditional or authentic weavings to collectors and tourists of the exotic Indians of the Southwest. In the 1990s, some Navajo weavers and the trading posts through which many of their weavings were sold began a revival of the Germantown style. This revival, among other things, called attention to the inventiveness of Navajo weavers and to the ability of cultures to patch themselves together and survive—by literally unweaving and reweaving the text(ile)s of the colonizing culture, then using that culture’s materials to create a new but nevertheless ‘‘Navajo’’ style. Of course, resistance, like culture, is never pure. Navajo weaving is intimately linked to the marketing efforts of non-Indians and the commodification of the dominant culture’s fantasized image of Native Americans and the Southwest. Both the Germantowns and the subsequent weaving styles are not pure expressions of traditional Navajo culture but are shaped by the dynamics of (neo)colonialism. These weavings are not only ‘‘simply’’ (essentially) expressions of Navajo culture and history but are also products of European and Euro-American markets, of the railroads, of tourism, and of the trading posts (themselves cultural hybrids of Native and Western, Anglo and Navajo, Mormon and Spanish), which mediated between the weavers and those who eventually purchased their weavings. Even the pre-Bosque Redondo Navajo weaving styles were involved in interactions with other Native American tribes (the Navajo likely learned weaving from the Puebloan cultures that inhabited the region before their arrival) and a system of trade relationships (Burnham, 2005). Indeed, the sheep from which they obtained their wool were a result of Spanish colonization; hence, the pre-Germantown woolen weavings were themselves hybrid even if the yarn was handspun and naturally dyed. If the history of a cultural practices is traced far enough, its hybridity (impurity) will almost inevitably be demonstrated (cf. Rogers, 1998). A dismissal of the Germantown weavings as inauthentic is not only driven by the essentialist, organic view of culture outlined by Clifford (1988), it overlooks the important role of cross-cultural appropriations in both ongoing cultural development and cultural survival. Such dismissals perpetuate the view of indigenous cultures in particular as static and without agency, and overlooks the important role of appropriation and hybridity in the ongoing constitution of identity as well as resistance—even prior to European contact and colonization. Power dynamics are an intrinsic part of these hybrid forms, but not as simple, one-sided formulas of powerful–powerless. The concerns here are whether the categories of cultural dominance and exploitation can effectively capture these dynamics and whether they do ‘‘epistemic violence’’ to the Navajo. As this case illustrates, transculturation is not always or only degradation or homogenization; it can also be constitutive of cultural particularity, agency, identity, inventiveness, and resistance—not only for those at Bosque Redondo and those who eventually resettled Navajo lands but also for the weavers, traders, and others involved in the contemporary revival of Germantown weaving. These contemporary Germantowns are, of course, also not ‘‘pure’’ but incorporate digital designs and colors of significance to the Native American Church (another hybrid cultural entity) and call forth parallels between the history of the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo with today’s struggles for cultural survival (Eyedazzlers Project, n.d.).

This week, the news hit that Aviator Nation — a California-based, “boho” clothing brand — was profiting by appropriating and selling Native culture without attribution or regard to the impact on Turtle Island’s original Peoples. Native Instagram rallied together to demand they stop, and Native People led a protest outside one of their stores. Before you read on, we ask that you join the call demanding Aviator Nation stop appropriating Native cultures and take solid measures toward fixing what they have broken. Some Real History In the present day, these so-called United States house 574 recognized tribes (along with numerous unrecognized tribes), yet many settlers continue to view Native Americans as nonexistent or extinct. This viewpoint is no accident. Currently, thanks largely to a refusal to teach real history, Indigenous People of Turtle Island are viewed by the dominant U.S. culture as some kind of historical footnote. According to Tara Houska, 83% of references in U.S. K-12 curriculum uses past tense when referencing Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. That’s a huge problem. When Native Peoples are purposefully written out of K-12 materials in any present sense, Native children will naturally feel invisible, invalid, and detached from their culture — and non-Native children inevitably grow up without an understanding of present-day Native culture. This strategic academic choice also props up so-called America's own propagandized narrative that this continent was a wild, empty, and undiscovered land when colonists arrived. Kids grow up with the impression — and grow into adults who still believe — that the People already here didn’t count then, and we shouldn’t count now. Notions to the contrary would, of course, force America to look closely at its brutal, genocidal history. The next logical step in that scenario is grappling with how colonization poisons the well, which, in turn, begs examination of how colonization ultimately affects everyone, whether or not they are empowered by structural racism. Brittany Woods-Orrison (Koyukon Denè, of Rampart Village) elaborates, “We are all Indigenous to somewhere; we all come from an ancestry that had a relationship with the land. While Indigenous people, for generations, have fought to hold onto their identity and community, white people continue to steal from us violently. Whiteness has exploited Indigenous cultures for generations to make up for their own lack [of cultural identity] and to try to make financial gains.” With that premise, we can start to understand how non-BIPOC folks can act in ways incredibly destructive to BIPOC existence, as recently embodied by the appropriation of Native culture by Aviator Nation. To be clear, this is not an article offering an out for racist behavior. It’s an explanation of how we got here, how we continue on this rotary of racism, and why we are always exhausted by the lack of growth from non-BIPOC folks. More on the Aviator Nation Problem To catch you up, Aviator Nation is a California-esque 1970s-inspired clothing company that uses tipis, traditional moccasins, and mascot faces in their marketing material. The owner, Paige Mycoskie, actually seeks to embody white saviorism, asking for gratitude and recognition for her “creating jobs for POC, Paying POC thru [sic] the entire COVID19 crisis, refusing to lay-off POC (even if that means money out of my pocket).” She also expects recognition and gratitude for her painting of “african american murals” on her store walls (she’s white). The list of her transgressions doesn’t end there. It goes on and on. As Mycoskie herself says, “we build tipis for a living” and “I worked with authentic Native Americans on this design” when referring to her “tipi” covered in neon colors and live-laugh-love chevrons. Such statements are reflective of her privilege. As the sister of Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, her business and life are propped up by the millions of dollars her brother makes from marketing his products as good for poor, brown children. On TOMS’ site, only one of every seven models is BIPOC … until you get to their impact report. There, they demonstrate the good they do for communities; suddenly everyone is Brown, Black or Native. Given the Mycoskies' origin story, it's no surprise they can't tell the difference between appropriation and appreciation. When the baseline for typical behavior includes using tipis and wearing sombreros and feathered headdresses (that's Blake, above, looking like Jake Angeli and his wife with her friends in the sombrero picture below), it's no wonder they’re surprised when asked to stop their racist behaviors. The Harm of Appropriation and Misrepresentation Let’s talk a little more about why appropriation and misrepresentation are so harmful. Lydia Poncé (Mayo/ Quechua) of the American Indian Movement says, “Cultural appropriation is not honoring Indigenous People; it is an injury causing harm to future Indigenous generations. Aviator Nation is attempting to brand their innocence with more words of racism, commodification, and white saviorism. We, the Indigenous community, are still here, and it is their obligation to correct this.” Sepia-toned photographs are the most common way the dominant American culture views Indigenous Peoples. And, in current culture, one of the most common ways Native Peoples see ourselves represented is in mascotry. On June 8, the Race, Ethnicity and Education Journal published a study highlighting the outcomes from these issues: “Low self-esteem, low community worth, and increased negative feelings of stress and depression are just some of the negative psychological effects Native American mascots wreak on the well-being of Native Americans, especially youth,” This dynamic becomes particularly significant when understood in the larger context. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among Native Peoples, and is the second highest cause of death for Natives 10-24, according to The National Indian Council on Aging. “Historical disenfranchisement through genocide and institutional racism has resulted in American Indians and Alaska Natives experiencing poorer health and socioeconomic outcomes. These social determinants of health intersect to create a situation that is detrimental to the physical and mental health of Indian communities. Cultural disconnection, alienation and pressure to assimilate all contribute to higher rates of suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives.” A chorus of voices is singing out about how Aviator Nation’s behavior exacerbates the larger problem. Courtney Little Axe (Natsista/NiSiWiNwi/Semvnole) says, “Our cultural practices were illegal until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978. Many of our ancestors were killed trying to preserve those very cultural practices and lifestyles that are being exploited. Cultural appropriation has been a problem that we have faced for far too long. Aviator Nation’s unethical treatment is not unique and happens way too often.” Indigenous Peoples Movement, a global coalition that unites all Indigenous peoples of the world, highlighted that, as Native People, we have many frontlines, including the dismantling of harmful stereotypes and cultural appropriations. “It’s bad enough we are fighting for our lands, our dignity, our waters, our women and men, and our future generations against this colonial system — but to continue to educate over and over again that our culture isn’t for sale is getting exhausting,” they told us. That exhaustion was echoed by others hoping that through education, we could find new understanding that could limit open racism. “[Paige Mycoskie’s] behavior indicates that she’s never headed to face this. America suffers from amnesia or it has selective memories, and that’s the issue behind this whole Critical Race Theory. When we aren’t teaching what has actually happened we have no idea how to fix the harm,” says NSRGNTS Collective.

Countless groups of indigenous people across the globe have a similar history of violence, loss, and oppression. This historical trauma creates a legacy that resonates across generations and is passed on to current generations. This well-documented phenomenon in recent years has been called historic trauma (Brave Heart, 2004; Cobb, 2006; Day, 2014; Wasserman, 2005; Weaver & Yellow Horse Brave Heart, 1999). It is estimated that during the 1930s–1940s, half of all American Indians in the United States were forced to attend boarding schools (Brave Heart, 2004; Cobb, 2006; Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways, 2011). These numbers were perhaps even greater in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Results from researchers who have attempted to measure the impact of historic trauma seem to indicate that American Indians have high levels of emotional distress including “anger, avoidance, anxiety, and depression” (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004, p. 127). Researchers have only recently begun to fully understand the long-term impact on the children, families, and communities. Those peoples who have experienced genocide through war, torture, and removal experience even deeper and longer-lasting trauma (Brave Heart, 2004; Cobb, 2006). It is hard to hold on to one’s cultural practices in the face of such profound loss. When elders are killed or removed from the community, who is left to teach the traditional ways, and what effects does this loss have on health and well-being (Brave Heart, 2004; Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways, 2011)? Recent research has concluded that early childhood trauma can have lasting impacts and may affect developmental growth (Wasserman, 2005). These impacts are seen in the dismal health, mental health, child welfare, and other poor outcomes present in indigenous communities. “Collective trauma unfolds as an omnipresent, community wide phenomenon, while individual trauma unfolds as a personal psychological phenomenon unrelated to a collective common experience” (Red Horse et al., 2000, p. 14). Indigenous groups who have experienced disruption of traditional ways of life—loss of land, disruption of government and family systems through war and trauma—now experience food and water insecurity and have become impoverished as a result. This is directly related to the loss of traditional lifeways. For example, in India, Tiplut Nongbri writes, “it is significant that tribal poverty is highest in states where the people have lost control over land” (International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs, n.d. Retrieved from http://www.iwgia.org/). One writer links this economic instability to the loss of “access to forests and non-timber produce, and to recent decisions taken by the Indian Supreme Court empowering the government to bring all forests under working plans and evict encroachers” (International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs, n.d. Retrieved from http://www.iwgia.org/). Across the world, loss of indigenous land leads to disastrous changes to ways of life for the people who are misplaced. This includes loss of agriculture, traditional food sources on land and in the water, and forest resources. Cultural survival means being able to sustain the beliefs and worldview of one’s ancestors in order to pass them on to those that come after us. Across the world, colonizing government policies and practices were designed to alter and destroy indigenous culture and ways. In spite of all of these efforts, many indigenous peoples throughout the world have managed to retain their values and practices (Day, 2014; Rheault, 1999; Simard & Blight, 2011). These worldviews are deeply embedded in language and culture. Two Canadian indigenous researchers describe their unique worldview: It is important to understand that through an Aboriginal lens, all things are related on a spiritual level. A primary difference between Aboriginal worldview—Aki naanaagadawaabiwi and Non-Aboriginal theories of development is that everything in Aboriginal worldview—Aki naanaagadawaabiwi is based on the spirit whereas the concept of spirituality or the spirit is often overlooked in Non-Aboriginal theories of development. As stated earlier, cultural identity is deeply tied to how people sees themselves as part of the larger group with whom they share common cultural distinctiveness. This way of viewing oneself and the world around you is shaped by everyday cultural experiences and is reinforced throughout one’s life. This learning is developmental in nature, with children learning from families, their environment, and their cultural group. This sense of one’s cultural self comes from learning the social cultural norms that exist within one’s specific group (Day, 2014; Rheault, 1999; Simard & Blight, 2011). These constructs embrace cultural values, tribal language, traditional teachings passed down through centuries, ceremonies, connection to a land base, shared history, and accumulated wisdom (Cobb, 2006; Rheault, 1999; Weaver, 2001). For many indigenous cultures, worldview is relational as opposed to linear, in other words, cultural meaning is framed by experiences with family and cultural community, the surrounding ecosystem, and spiritual experiences. If one views the world through a relational manner, events are shaped by other events and relationships that are not necessarily linear. Most Native people raised within a cultural setting view the world through a relational lens (Day, 2014; Cross, 2010; Rheault, 1999). If one sees the world in a linear fashion, things seems to fall into line in a one-dimensional, logical progression. Those who see the world as linear also have a tendency to believe that individual effort can shape your course. A relational worldview takes into account unseen forces and is more accepting of “fate.” This is an important concept for social workers to understand when working with indigenous people. Cross (2010) says that for indigenous people “balance and harmony in relationships between multiple variables, including spiritual forces, make up the core of the thought system. Every event is understood in relation to all other events regardless of time, space, or physical existence. Health exists only when things are in balance and harmony” (p. 2). Children raised using a relational worldview have different experiences and perspectives on health, well-being, family, and spiritual connections. Most indigenous peoples understand the connection between health and well-being and maintaining balance within the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects of one’s life. This is important within the individual self, one’s family and extended family, and within one’s tribal community (Day, 2014; Simard & Blight, 2011). This embedded identity is how cultures maintain and thrive. Living life within one’s culture requires that children have meaningful interaction with extended family, community, and culture. “In tribal practice, family (and cultural) preservation involves bringing families in balance with community, spiritual, and other natural relationships” (Red Horse et al., 2000, p. 22). Having a cultural “home base” upon which to rely helps individuals and groups to be resilient. This cultural touchstone helps to ensure cultural survival in times of duress. Developing this cultural touchstone starts before birth, often with ceremonies and teachings about pregnancy: how to eat, how to prepare for birth, and instructions about childrearing (Lowell, Kildea, Liddle, Cox, & Paterson, 2015; Rheault, 1999). This cultural base grows throughout ones life span and is transmitted intergenerationally. For culture to survive, this must be done not only in the context of family but also in the context of a larger indigenous group. One such culture in the United States and Canada are the Anishinaabe people, who reside in southern Canada and the northern Midwest of the United States. Like many indigenous people, they have teachings about their core values called “grandfather teachings.” These are used to teach children about important ways of being in relationship with one another and the world. It takes a long time to fully understand these teachings as they are embedded in the language and culture of the Anishinaabe. But even providing a short description of them provides a glimpse into the central beliefs of the people. These teachings are (Day, 2014): wisdom— to value knowledge and learning throughout your life and from many sources love—to embrace peace and have unconditional regard for others respect—to treat others in a caring manner bravery—to act with integrity even in the face of fear honesty—to keep one’s word and behave in an honorable way humility—to know your place in the larger picture and not put yourself above the Great Spirit, animals, plants, or other life truth—to be honest with yourself and others These Anishinaabe values provide an underpinning for tribal members in shaping policy and practice. The teachers of these values are most often the elders who have learned these lessons many times over and can provide important context. As one Anishinaabe researcher stated: Without these teachers, how else can a person know how to be good? They are oral reference libraries that account for stories, legends, prophecies, ceremonies, songs, dances, language and the philosophy of the people. Elders are often held in the highest esteem in indigenous communities for the lifetime of wisdom they have acquired. Learning about ones cultural ways takes a lifetime and requires a strong community with knowledgeable elders to help the children learn their traditional ways and beliefs. This is the essence of cultural survival.

Although its ‘‘roots’’ in an organic metaphor for culture may be unfortunate given my discussion of Clifford (1988), the concept of hybridity is useful in clarifying dynamics of appropriation under transculturation, understood here as a historically specific condition. Kraidy (2002) discusses hybridity in the context of cultural globalization, focusing on its potential for international and intercultural communication studies. Despite problems with prior uses of the concept, Kraidy sees no ‘‘credible substitute to characterize the dual forces of globalization and localization, cohesion and dispersal, disjuncture and mixture, that capture transnational and transcultural dialectics’’ (p. 332). Kraidy warns against the importation of hybridity into communication studies as a merely ‘‘descriptive device, i.e. describing the local reception of global media texts as a site of cultural mixture’’ (p. 317). Instead of understanding hybridity as the product of local–global interactions, ‘‘hybridity needs to be understood as a communicative practice constitutive of, and constituted by, sociopolitical and economic arrangements’’ (p. 317). Kraidy’s approach highlights ‘‘the mutually constitutive interplay and overlap of cultural, economic and political forces in international communication processes’’ while positing ‘‘the relationship between structure and agency as a dialectical articulation whose results are not preordained’’ (p. 333). Following Kraidy (2002), transculturation is not only distinct from cultural exchange in that multiple cultures and multiple acts of appropriation are involved but it also retains the implications of unequal power of cultural dominance and exploitation while acknowledging the radically different nature of appropriation in the global–local contexts of transnational capitalism. Transculturation highlights, in ways that cultural dominance and exploitation do not, the hybridity of cultural forms and, following Clifford (1988), the lack of ‘‘authenticity,’’ ‘‘purity,’’ and ‘‘essence’’ in the elements being appropriated and in the appropriations themselves. The point, however, is not to return to a pluralist conception of power, or to pretend that the implications discussed under cultural dominance and exploitation no longer apply. Transculturation and hybridity are as inescapable as cultural appropriation itself—an ‘‘always already’’ condition of contemporary culture. Although specific acts of transcultural appropriation vary in the degree of choice involved, for most individuals and cultures today, the condition of transculturation is an involuntary one. The case of Hopi kachina dolls produced for consumption by tourists and collectors of indigenous arts from the southwestern United States (mentioned earlier under cultural exploitation) demonstrates the international and transcultural contexts in which even seemingly ‘‘domestic’’ appropriations occur. These products are shaped by the domestic and international market in Native arts, including commodification of Western fantasies about Native Americans; by the efforts of Hopi and other Native groups to establish economic viability in the U.S. economy; and by the dialectic of cultural assimilation and cultural survival. Some kachina dolls (and numerous other Native art forms) are not only made by non-Natives but also produced outside the United States, adding an international component of both cultural and labor exploitation to the kachina doll trade. ‘‘Imitation’’ kachina dolls abound, leading to a heavy emphasis on authenticity by dealers in Native arts. However, the creation of ‘‘hybrid’’ kachina dolls (as well as potentially hybrid forms of traditional katsina figures), such as those incorporating nontraditional materials, even by‘‘traditional Native artists,’’ complicates notions of purity and authenticity. In a context in which hybridity is inescapable and in which colonized peoples necessarily appropriate aspects of other, often dominating, cultures, ‘‘cultural or artistic ‘authenticity’ has as much to do with an inventive present as with a past, its objectification, preservation, or revival’’ (Clifford, 1988, p. 222). This ‘‘inventive present’’ includes the (involuntary) condition of transculturation as well as the appropriative tactics used by subordinated cultures, few of which could be considered pure. Even if their presence originates from cultural dominance, pickup trucks, country music, rap, and rodeo are a part of tribal life in the southwestern United States along with katsinas, corn pollen, and eagle feathers—not only as cultural impositions or evidence of assimilation but also as part of the ongoing dynamics of culture, identity, survival, and resistance. Even a seemingly random teepee at a roadside Native American arts outlet—oddly placed, an object more appropriate for the Great Plains and its tribes than the Southwest, serving to cue the Western image of ‘‘the Indian’’ more than to represent any particular tribal identity or heritage—cannot be dismissed a priori as alien, inauthentic, and nothing more than a ploy to lure in ignorant tourists (though it is). Its (in)authenticity is more complex than an organic or primitivist view of culture can accommodate, and its dismissal as inauthentic obscures the cultural dynamics of a living people as much as its alien presence. Stereotypes perpetuated about Native Americans via Hollywood (including teepees as a Native American universal) are complicit in the subordination and exploitation of Native peoples, but they also constitute part of the lived experiences of those peoples, experiences that are never determined in advance by the political economy of their representation by the dominant culture and that can serve to provide forms of agency (e.g., possibilities for reappropriation) not otherwise available. Appropriations in such transcultural contexts—involving multiple Southwestern tribes with varying degrees of traditional and assimilated practices as well as the descendants of Spanish, Anglo, and Mormon colonizers, using a means of habitation employed by tribes of the Great Plains to attract tourists off a highway paved with rock taken from a Hopi sacred site, buzzing with cars (some with indigenous names such as Cherokee, Pontiac, and Touareg) carrying tourists not only from Phoenix and Los Angeles but also from Sao Paolo, Berlin, and Tokyo, who are reading guidebooks to the region distributed by transnational media conglomerates and who just might purchase a Kokopelli t-shirt or kachina doll—articulates not only a dizzying array of factors, none determinant, but also possibilities for a variety of potentially effective agencies. These appropriations and agencies are inauthentic but perhaps thrive precisely because of such inauthenticity. This is not a world of autonomy, equality, and genuine pluralism but of domination, struggle, survival, and resistance; one which can be better understood via hybridity and indigenization and in which concepts such as purity, authenticity, and continuity can do as much to perpetuate (neo)- colonial relations as to overcome them (Clifford, 1988). At the same time, however, concepts like transculturation and hybridity can be deployed to delegitimize (legitimate) claims of cultural ownership by subordinated groups, potentially perpetuating (illegitimate) acts of cultural exploitation and thereby questioning whether transculturation should supplant cultural domination and exploitation as valid types of cultural appropriation. The bind here is that although cultural essence and its attendant traits (singular, bounded, static, and proprietary) perpetuate primitivist, organic, and static conceptions of culture (especially with regards to indigenous cultures) and enable exploitative commodifications, many of the same assumptions inhere in arguments for the rights of colonized cultures to oppose exploitation and to practice, perpetuate, and (re)claim control over their culture (e.g., Whitt, 1995). Hence, as mentioned above, many cultural critics draw parallels between the theft of indigenous lands and the theft of indigenous culture—a rhetorically useful but nevertheless conceptually problematic analog. Transculturation as an ‘‘always already’’ of cultural existence Whereas many of the conceptualizations of transculturation and related concepts (hybridity, indigenization) are grounded in the particular conditions of transnational capitalism, the critique of the very concepts of culture and appropriation that undergird the first three types of appropriation can be extended beyond the contemporary condition to previous eras. That is, transculturation questions whether the conception of culture as singular, bounded essence has ever had empirical validity or conceptual coherence. Transculturation, as conceived here, calls not only for an updating of the understanding of contemporary cultural dynamics but also for a radical reconceptualization of culture itself: as conjunctural, relational, or dialogic; as constituted by, not merely engaged in, appropriative relations; and as an ongoing process of absorption and transformation rather than static configurations of practices. Transculturation is not, however, a neoliberal licensing of cultural imperialism or an embracing of the radical indeterminacy and antimaterialism of some postmodern theories of culture. Transculturation questions many of the assumptions undergirding cultural dominance and exploitation, but it remains oriented toward the material dimensions and implications of cultural practices and sensitive to the complex dynamics of disproportionate power. Transculturation identifies forces of cultural homogenization and highlights the influential role of economic, political, military, and other forms of power while also recognizing how cultural appropriation can be constitutive of cultural particularity and agency. The ongoing imposition of the essentialist view of culture embedded in the first three types of appropriation onto various others (marginalized and/or colonized peoples) may constitute the kind of ‘‘epistemic violence’’ critiqued by Spivak (1988). The history of Navajo weaving demonstrates the validity of transculturation’s conception of culture and appropriation in situations prior to the current globalized era. Weaving has long been a central part of Navajo (Dine´) culture, and this continues today as Navajo weavers prepare rugs for display and sale in museums, Native arts outlets, and trading posts on or near the Navajo Nation, and other uses. However, although a particular idea of ‘‘authentic’’ Navajo weaving (in terms of materials, techniques, and patterns) affects the value attached to such weavings, the past 150 years of Navajo weaving have included a wide range of materials and patterns, born of both the conditions under which the Navajo have survived and Navajo inventiveness. A brief review of the recent Eyedazzlers Project (n.d.) and related research by Sheri Burnham (2005) concerning the Germantown period in Navajo weaving and its recent revival illustrates the complex cultural intersections, conditions, and agencies involved in acts of appropriation and the limitations of an essentialist view of culture. In 1863, the U.S. Army forced the defeated Navajo on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. Bereft of their sheep and unable to grow crops or otherwise support themselves, Navajo women began unraveling Army-issue blankets and reweaving the materials (Burnham, 2005). Eventually, Germantown yarn from Philadelphia was provided to the Navajo via the railroad. This finely spun and brightly colored yarn was very different from their traditional handspun and naturally dyed yarn, contributing to the development of a distinct style of weavings referred to as Germantowns or Eyedazzlers. The use of Germantown yarn and related styles of weaving continued for approximately 40 years before a return to more traditional patterns and materials. For some, Germantowns represented a loss of authenticity and tradition; a return to earlier styles was driven in part by efforts to market more traditional or authentic weavings to collectors and tourists of the exotic Indians of the Southwest. In the 1990s, some Navajo weavers and the trading posts through which many of their weavings were sold began a revival of the Germantown style. This revival, among other things, called attention to the inventiveness of Navajo weavers and to the ability of cultures to patch themselves together and survive—by literally unweaving and reweaving the text(ile)s of the colonizing culture, then using that culture’s materials to create a new but nevertheless ‘‘Navajo’’ style. Of course, resistance, like culture, is never pure. Navajo weaving is intimately linked to the marketing efforts of non-Indians and the commodification of the dominant culture’s fantasized image of Native Americans and the Southwest. Both the Germantowns and the subsequent weaving styles are not pure expressions of traditional Navajo culture but are shaped by the dynamics of (neo)colonialism. These weavings are not only ‘‘simply’’ (essentially) expressions of Navajo culture and history but are also products of European and Euro-American markets, of the railroads, of tourism, and of the trading posts (themselves cultural hybrids of Native and Western, Anglo and Navajo, Mormon and Spanish), which mediated between the weavers and those who eventually purchased their weavings. Even the pre-Bosque Redondo Navajo weaving styles were involved in interactions with other Native American tribes (the Navajo likely learned weaving from the Puebloan cultures that inhabited the region before their arrival) and a system of trade relationships (Burnham, 2005). Indeed, the sheep from which they obtained their wool were a result of Spanish colonization; hence, the pre-Germantown woolen weavings were themselves hybrid even if the yarn was handspun and naturally dyed. If the history of a cultural practices is traced far enough, its hybridity (impurity) will almost inevitably be demonstrated (cf. Rogers, 1998). A dismissal of the Germantown weavings as inauthentic is not only driven by the essentialist, organic view of culture outlined by Clifford (1988), it overlooks the important role of cross-cultural appropriations in both ongoing cultural development and cultural survival. Such dismissals perpetuate the view of indigenous cultures in particular as static and without agency, and overlooks the important role of appropriation and hybridity in the ongoing constitution of identity as well as resistance—even prior to European contact and colonization. Power dynamics are an intrinsic part of these hybrid forms, but not as simple, one-sided formulas of powerful–powerless. The concerns here are whether the categories of cultural dominance and exploitation can effectively capture these dynamics and whether they do ‘‘epistemic violence’’ to the Navajo. As this case illustrates, transculturation is not always or only degradation or homogenization; it can also be constitutive of cultural particularity, agency, identity, inventiveness, and resistance—not only for those at Bosque Redondo and those who eventually resettled Navajo lands but also for the weavers, traders, and others involved in the contemporary revival of Germantown weaving. These contemporary Germantowns are, of course, also not ‘‘pure’’ but incorporate digital designs and colors of significance to the Native American Church (another hybrid cultural entity) and call forth parallels between the history of the Long Walk and Bosque Redondo with today’s struggles for cultural survival (Eyedazzlers Project, n.d.).

*Mentions of domestic violence and sexual assault in the shrunk portions of the card

When non-Indians use Indian names, imagery, iconography, and other symbols—particularly for commercial purposes and without Indian input— Indian tribes and individuals increasingly claim that such usages constitute “cultural appropriation.”9 Wide-ranging examples include Victoria’s Secret models walking the runway in Indian headdresses,10 Urban Outfitters marketing “Navajo Print Wrapped Flasks” and “Navajo Hipster Panties,”11 Boy Scout Troops mimicking Pueblo Indian dances,12 and the many sports teams with Indian mascots.13 These examples and a multitude of others just like them are seemingly such a part of mainstream American society that they are often overlooked.

This week, the news hit that Aviator Nation — a California-based, “boho” clothing brand — was profiting by appropriating and selling Native culture without attribution or regard to the impact on Turtle Island’s original Peoples. Native Instagram rallied together to demand they stop, and Native People led a protest outside one of their stores. Before you read on, we ask that you join the call demanding Aviator Nation stop appropriating Native cultures and take solid measures toward fixing what they have broken. Some Real History In the present day, these so-called United States house 574 recognized tribes (along with numerous unrecognized tribes), yet many settlers continue to view Native Americans as nonexistent or extinct. This viewpoint is no accident. Currently, thanks largely to a refusal to teach real history, Indigenous People of Turtle Island are viewed by the dominant U.S. culture as some kind of historical footnote. According to Tara Houska, 83% of references in U.S. K-12 curriculum uses past tense when referencing Indigenous Peoples of Turtle Island. That’s a huge problem. When Native Peoples are purposefully written out of K-12 materials in any present sense, Native children will naturally feel invisible, invalid, and detached from their culture — and non-Native children inevitably grow up without an understanding of present-day Native culture. This strategic academic choice also props up so-called America's own propagandized narrative that this continent was a wild, empty, and undiscovered land when colonists arrived. Kids grow up with the impression — and grow into adults who still believe — that the People already here didn’t count then, and we shouldn’t count now. Notions to the contrary would, of course, force America to look closely at its brutal, genocidal history. The next logical step in that scenario is grappling with how colonization poisons the well, which, in turn, begs examination of how colonization ultimately affects everyone, whether or not they are empowered by structural racism. Brittany Woods-Orrison (Koyukon Denè, of Rampart Village) elaborates, “We are all Indigenous to somewhere; we all come from an ancestry that had a relationship with the land. While Indigenous people, for generations, have fought to hold onto their identity and community, white people continue to steal from us violently. Whiteness has exploited Indigenous cultures for generations to make up for their own lack [of cultural identity] and to try to make financial gains.” With that premise, we can start to understand how non-BIPOC folks can act in ways incredibly destructive to BIPOC existence, as recently embodied by the appropriation of Native culture by Aviator Nation. To be clear, this is not an article offering an out for racist behavior. It’s an explanation of how we got here, how we continue on this rotary of racism, and why we are always exhausted by the lack of growth from non-BIPOC folks. More on the Aviator Nation Problem To catch you up, Aviator Nation is a California-esque 1970s-inspired clothing company that uses tipis, traditional moccasins, and mascot faces in their marketing material. The owner, Paige Mycoskie, actually seeks to embody white saviorism, asking for gratitude and recognition for her “creating jobs for POC, Paying POC thru [sic] the entire COVID19 crisis, refusing to lay-off POC (even if that means money out of my pocket).” She also expects recognition and gratitude for her painting of “african american murals” on her store walls (she’s white). The list of her transgressions doesn’t end there. It goes on and on. As Mycoskie herself says, “we build tipis for a living” and “I worked with authentic Native Americans on this design” when referring to her “tipi” covered in neon colors and live-laugh-love chevrons. Such statements are reflective of her privilege. As the sister of Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes, her business and life are propped up by the millions of dollars her brother makes from marketing his products as good for poor, brown children. On TOMS’ site, only one of every seven models is BIPOC … until you get to their impact report. There, they demonstrate the good they do for communities; suddenly everyone is Brown, Black or Native. Given the Mycoskies' origin story, it's no surprise they can't tell the difference between appropriation and appreciation. When the baseline for typical behavior includes using tipis and wearing sombreros and feathered headdresses (that's Blake, above, looking like Jake Angeli and his wife with her friends in the sombrero picture below), it's no wonder they’re surprised when asked to stop their racist behaviors. The Harm of Appropriation and Misrepresentation Let’s talk a little more about why appropriation and misrepresentation are so harmful. Lydia Poncé (Mayo/ Quechua) of the American Indian Movement says, “Cultural appropriation is not honoring Indigenous People; it is an injury causing harm to future Indigenous generations. Aviator Nation is attempting to brand their innocence with more words of racism, commodification, and white saviorism. We, the Indigenous community, are still here, and it is their obligation to correct this.” Sepia-toned photographs are the most common way the dominant American culture views Indigenous Peoples. And, in current culture, one of the most common ways Native Peoples see ourselves represented is in mascotry. On June 8, the Race, Ethnicity and Education Journal published a study highlighting the outcomes from these issues: “Low self-esteem, low community worth, and increased negative feelings of stress and depression are just some of the negative psychological effects Native American mascots wreak on the well-being of Native Americans, especially youth,” This dynamic becomes particularly significant when understood in the larger context. Suicide is one of the leading causes of death among Native Peoples, and is the second highest cause of death for Natives 10-24, according to The National Indian Council on Aging. “Historical disenfranchisement through genocide and institutional racism has resulted in American Indians and Alaska Natives experiencing poorer health and socioeconomic outcomes. These social determinants of health intersect to create a situation that is detrimental to the physical and mental health of Indian communities. Cultural disconnection, alienation and pressure to assimilate all contribute to higher rates of suicide among American Indians and Alaska Natives.” A chorus of voices is singing out about how Aviator Nation’s behavior exacerbates the larger problem. Courtney Little Axe (Natsista/NiSiWiNwi/Semvnole) says, “Our cultural practices were illegal until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed in 1978. Many of our ancestors were killed trying to preserve those very cultural practices and lifestyles that are being exploited. Cultural appropriation has been a problem that we have faced for far too long. Aviator Nation’s unethical treatment is not unique and happens way too often.” Indigenous Peoples Movement, a global coalition that unites all Indigenous peoples of the world, highlighted that, as Native People, we have many frontlines, including the dismantling of harmful stereotypes and cultural appropriations. “It’s bad enough we are fighting for our lands, our dignity, our waters, our women and men, and our future generations against this colonial system — but to continue to educate over and over again that our culture isn’t for sale is getting exhausting,” they told us. That exhaustion was echoed by others hoping that through education, we could find new understanding that could limit open racism. “[Paige Mycoskie’s] behavior indicates that she’s never headed to face this. America suffers from amnesia or it has selective memories, and that’s the issue behind this whole Critical Race Theory. When we aren’t teaching what has actually happened we have no idea how to fix the harm,” says NSRGNTS Collective.

The Copyright Act of 1976 does not explicitly discriminate on the basis of race or culture.17 But copyright law was originally crafted in a Western society strongly influenced by the forces of racism and nationalism.18 Race is the socially constructed differentiation of groups based on phenotype.19 Despite being a social construction, race (and its associated cultures) has long been a critical factor in how the law has treated individuals, whether by design or in effect.20 To understand the predicament of racial minorities under copyright law, it is important to first examine the history of copyright law in the United States. Through the lens of critical race theory, this Part explains how the structural elements of U.S. copyright law have left minority artists’ works unprotected and open to white exploitation. The rise of critical race theory from the 1980s onward increased professional and scholarly consideration of how law affects different racial groups—with the ultimate goal being a “norm of ‘racial equality’ where different groups will not continue to suffer the oppression and subordination that they have suffered.”21 While races and cultures are continuously shifting and evolving, critical race theory has understood intellectual property principally as a model for protecting white, or Western, privilege, as well as this group’s understanding of society.22 As communications scholar Anjali Vats and intellectual property law scholar Deidré Keller concluded, a study of race and culture in the context of intellectual property should not be limited to the dichotomy of white and Black, but instead a comparison of the white or Western-created laws and their effects on racial minorities.23 The structure of copyright protections and rights under the Copyright Act have long provided unequal opportunities for racial minorities and their cultural expressions.24 From 1776 until the 1960s, U.S. intellectual property law’s relationship with artists of color was defined by “appropriation, degradation, and devaluation.”25 The music industry, in particular, profited enormously from the innovation of Black artists by capitalizing on fundamental genres of American music such as ragtime, blues, and jazz, while providing minimal remuneration or recognition for those styles’ Black progenitors.26 Music is representative of how U.S. copyright law considered Western perspectives on creative works, while failing to recognize nonWestern artists and artistic traditions. The structural elements of U.S. copyright—(1) requiring fixation in a tangible form, (2) disfavoring improvisation, and (3) mandating a known, recently living author—have led to lower compensation and recognition for racial minority artists or withheld protection altogether.27 Fixation is a basic requirement for any U.S. copyright protection—the work must be contained in a tangible physical form.28 This model of protection imposed a distinctly Western European tradition on copyright for all music.29 While Western Europe has a tradition of composers who drafted their music in written notation,30 other cultures around the globe have often lacked a written composition tradition, instead placing greater emphasis on a keen musical ear and improvisation.31 The centrality of fixation for music was set in an infamous court decision from 1948. In Supreme Records v. Decca Records, Inc., the issue before the Southern District of California was whether a white singer’s cover recording of a song recorded by a Black singer was lawful.32 In 1948, sound recordings were not yet protected under federal copyright, so the case was brought under unfair competition law.33 But, in deciding the case, Judge Yankwich imposed his own (white) musical tastes on intellectual property law; he concluded the original recording by a Black artist was “thi[c]k, mechanical, [and] lacking inspiration,” while a cover created by a white artist was “rich, against a musically colorful background. . . . sound[ing] full, meaty, [and] polished.”34 In addition, he held that anything added to a song in a recording alone, rather than the underlying musical work, could be freely copied.35 This was disastrous for Black and other non-white musicians, many of whom did not write down their songs in musical notation, which was necessary prior to 1978 to receive copyright protection for musical works.36 This long-standing bias favoring written over oral music37 is inherent in U.S. copyright law, leaving out protections for Black and other musical traditions. For example, African tribal music was transmitted orally for generations, and this tradition was maintained when Africans were brought as slaves to the United States.38 Based on their African oral musical traditions and enforced illiteracy under U.S. slavery, enslaved Black people created and shared music almost exclusively through performance.39In many ways, the experiences and methods of creation by Black artists—along with their under-inclusion in copyright law—can be likened to those of Indigenous artists.40 Native American and Indigenous artwork, music, and traditional knowledge are also frequently left outside the confines of intellectual property protection; this is due to existing for millennia, lacking an identifiable author, and being created by multiple people or an entire community.41 Scholar Trevor Reed explained that the unequal treatment of Indigenous creative works stems from the Copyright Act (1) requiring that works be fixed; (2) requiring that they are original; and (3) not allowing ideas to be protected.42 Indigenous cultures seldom physically record folklore or traditional knowledge.43 For example, Indigenous traditional oral music in the United States and around the world rarely manifests in written form.44 The resulting lack of protections for Indigenous artists led to their exploitation by creative industries.45 For example, the Zulu tribesman who composed the famous song from Disney’s The Lion King, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” was merely paid a small amount and only received credit for writing the song decades later.46 The Zulu composer was not alone; the low degree of originality required for copyright allowed imitators of artistic styles to make windfalls while the progenitors of those styles languished in obscurity since artistic style is not eligible for copyright protection.47 Several scholars and lawyers have tried to find a place for Indigenous community cultural expressions and traditional knowledge through specific intellectual property protections.48 However, problems with using copyright to protect Indigenous cultural heritage have persisted. Such oral forms of music creation were directly at odds with U.S. copyright law’s requirement that music be notated to receive protection.49The fixation issue was not remedied by including sound recordings in the Copyright Act. Sound recordings have been protected since 1972, but receive more narrow protections than other copyrightable works.50 The sound recording itself cannot be copied directly under copyright law, but anyone can freely imitate a sound recording, provided there is not an underlying musical work with copyright protection of its own.51 After 1978, phonorecords of sound recordings could be used to meet the fixation requirement for musical works.52 Fixation in a sound recording now qualifies for musical work copyright registration, but only if the recording artist and composer are the same person.53 However, this shift in the law still requires fixation—neglecting songs that were neither written nor recorded and merely sung or performed live.54 Improvisation is another non-Western musical practice not encompassed within U.S. copyright law. Improvising plays a central role in a number of musical traditions. African music emphasizes improvisation—with varying stanzas, melodies, and notes—instead of written stasis.55 Stemming from these African musical traditions, improvisation maintains an important and central role in Black music in the United States, from spirituals to hip hop.56 The various musical styles that emerged from Black musical traditions, such as jazz and blues, emphasize spontaneous—never written—improvisation.57 Indeed, blues music was traditionally not transcribed on sheetmusic at all, instead focusing on the musician’s ear and building off common lyrics and musical forms.58 African and Black music are not alone in utilizing improvisation. For instance, Middle Eastern music emphasizes melodic, improvised solos (called “taqsims”) and ornamentations.59 Indian classical music is also heavily based on unwritten improvisation.60 Despite the broad importance of improvisation across global musical traditions, it is not protected under, and even maligned by U.S. copyright law. Improvisation, as a spontaneous and live performance, does not meet the fixation requirement for copyright. In addition, improvisation from set melodies is at odds with copyright’s understanding of derivative works. A derivative work is a work “based upon one or more preexisting works . . . in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.”61 Thus, arrangements or covers of copyrighted musical works qualify as derivatives and receive copyright protection.62 However, derivative works can only be authored by the copyright holder (i.e., the composer), as it is one of the copyright holder’s exclusive rights.63 Unlike other exclusive rights conferred upon the owner of a copyrighted musical work, there is nocompulsory license for derivative works.64 This allows the holder of a copyright in a musical work to refuse or condition the creation of a derivative work on unequal or even unconscionable terms, such as requiring the performer to sign over all rights in the derivative work.65 Related to the derivative work problem, a new issue has emerged since the inclusion of sound recordings in the Copyright Act of 1976: sampling—”the act of taking a portion of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or an audio recording in a different song or piece.”66 For example, the modern genres of hip hop and rap both depend heavily on sampling for musical expression.67 Yet, sampling was quickly blocked by the courts. In Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Brothers Records, the Southern District of New York held that Biz Markie’s rap song “Alone Again” impermissibly sampled a portion from Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Alone Again (Naturally).”68 The Court held—devastatingly for genres like rap—that sampling without permission from the original copyright owner constituted blatant copyright infringement.69 Obtaining licenses for every sample presented a significant logistical and financial burden for rap artists.70 And unlike other parts of music copyright, there is no compulsory license for sampling (i.e., reproducing the sound recording); it is instead up to the copyright owner’s discretion whether to license the work or not, and to name the price.71 This forced rap artists to change how they create music or risk copyright sanctions.72 Indeed, the challenges posed by copyright to Black artists have led many to alter their creativity or leave music entirely.73 A third way in which U.S. copyright law has not equally protected racial minorities’ creative works is in requiring a known, recently alive author to gain copyright protection.74 Many centuries old, traditional Indigenous and non-Western songs and arts have communal or unknown creators.75 U.S. copyright law requires a known author and only protects works for a limited period of time, leaving these important but ancient works in the public domain.76 While such works remain unprotected, others can exploit traditional music and arts for their own profit without worrying about copyright infringement claims.77 This facilitates the free commercial repurposing of Indigenous cultural symbols and practices.78 U.S. copyright law defines creative arts as endeavors that are at least partially about making a profit,79 but this commercial approach is at odds with other artistic traditions. For example, Indigenous and non-Western societies around the globe value music as integral to their communities’ culture, and for non-commercial purposes such as medicine.80 The commercial appropriation of Indigenous cultural expression can be especially harmful due to the spiritual or sacred nature of these works.81 Thus, in these three ways, copyright law’s structure poorly serves living musical traditions.82 In response to the inequality perpetrated by Western copyright laws, other countries have started providing more robust copyright protections for diverse and Indigenous creative arts. In Senegal, for example, the government passed legislation specifically protecting folklore from unauthorized use in 1973, requiring royalty payments when using folklore works.83 Meanwhile, Qatar protects national folklore and assigns authorship to the state to prevent improper use or commercial exploitation of traditional works.84 In Brazil, copyright law specifically provides protection for performers, including those performing folklore expressions.85 Azerbaijan does not protect works of folklore under copyright, but instead protects these works under a separate law entirely.86 Similarly, Ethiopia includes tangible and intangible cultural heritage under its cultural heritage protection law, which prevents uses of traditional artistic expressions and works that impair their historical, scientific, or artistic value.87 Many other countries at least acknowledge the special position of traditional knowledge under copyright and patent law, if not provide active protection for it.88 In stark contrast, U.S. copyright law and international copyright laws 89 have generally failed to provide protections for traditional and non-Western forms of cultural expression. The very limited exceptions are for Native American works, which are somewhat protected under false advertising and trademark law, but not copyright law.90 The Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 prohibits misrepresentation of goods as Native American or Alaska Native goods.91 Alaska has adopted a similar Alaska Native handicraft certification program.92 Under its power to investigate unfair trade practices, the Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has investigated cases of companies falsely claiming a good is made by Native American people.93 The United States Patent and Trademark Office (“USPTO”) also created a Database of Native American Tribal Insignia as a reference tool of official tribal insignia for trademark examiners to deny trademarks falsely suggesting a connection with Native American tribes.94 While these initiatives are a worthy start,95 they focus on unfair competition and trademark law, leaving the poor protection for Native American works under U.S. copyright law untouched.96

Western scientists are proclaiming the start of a ‘sixth mass extinction event’ that may involve the destruction of more than three quarters of earth’s currently-existing life forms. In their attempts to explain this phenomenon, most scientists have converged around four major, interlinked drivers: climate change, habitat destruction, species exchange, and the direct killing of plants and animals. In most cases, these drivers are understood as the unintended consequences of generic ‘human’ activity, and as a result of desirable trends such as development or urbanization (Wilson 2002; Barnosky 2014; Ceballos 2016). A crucial driver is missing from this list: transversal structural violence against Indigenous peoples and their relations, and colonial violence in particular. ‘Structural violence’ involves systemic forms of harm, exclusion and discrimination that disproportionately affect particular groups, and which can take many forms (physical, psychological, economic, gendered and others). They are embedded in and expressed through political, cultural, economic and social structures (Farmer 2009) that can persist across large spans of time and space. I use the term ‘transversal’ to refer to forms of structural violence that extend across multiple boundaries – not only those of nation-states, but also other kinds of nations (human and otherwise), communities or kinship groups, and temporalities. Prime examples of transversal structural violence include: settler colonialism, colonial genocides (Woolford et al 2014); environmental racism or ‘slow violence’, including toxification and pollution; and complexes of sexual, physical, communal, spiritual and land-based violence associated with the extractive industries. Each of these forms of violence is ecologically devastating, and their convergence in European projects of colonisation is even more so. Many formations of transversal structural violence are significant causes of the so-called ‘four horsemen’ of extinction mentioned above. For instance, ‘direct killing’ is carried out to clear land for settlement, and it occurs as a result of ecological damage caused by resource extraction. Settler colonialism, carbon-based economies and regimes of environmental racism also support forms of socio-economic organization (for instance, carbon and energy-intensive urbanized societies) that intensify climate change and increase habitat destruction. Meanwhile, colonization has played a significant role in the ongoing transfer of life forms across the planet – whether unintentionally (e.g. the transfer of fish in the bilge water of ships); as an instrument of agricultural settlement (e.g. cattle ranching), or as a deliberate strategy of violence (e.g. smallpox). However, transversal structural violence is a driver of extinction in itself, with its own distinct manifestations. First, it involves the disruption or severance of relations and kinship structures between human communities and other life forms, and the dissolution of Indigenous systems of governance, laws and protocols that have co-created and sustained plural worlds over millennia (Borrows 2010; Atleo 2012; Kimmerer 2013). Second, the destruction of Indigenous knowledges through policies of assimilation, expropriation, cultural appropriation and other strategies undermines these forms of order and the relationships they nurture. Third, the displacement of and/or restricted access to land by Indigenous peoples interferes with practices of caring for land or Country that are necessary for the survival of humans and other life forms (Bawaka Country 2015). Colonial genocides embody all of these forms of destruction by killing or displacing Indigenous communities, undermining Indigenous modes of governance and kinship systems, systematically destroying relationships between life forms and erasing knowledge. All of these modes of violence weaken co-constitutive relationships between Indigenous communities, other life forms and ecosystems that have enabled their collaborative survival. This results in disruptions to ecosystems – and climate – that Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte (2016) has recently argued would have been considered a dystopia by his Ancestors. In other words, transversal structural violence, and colonial violence in particular, are fundamental drivers of global patterns of extinction. It stands to reason, then, that responses to extinction that focus on managing endangered species or populations, or ‘backing up’ genetic material, are insufficient: they leave the structures of violence intact and may add to their power. Instead, efforts to address extinction need to focus on identifying, confronting and dismantling these formations of violence, and on restoring or strengthening the relations they sever.

Settlers love to contemplate the possibility of their own extinction; to read many contemporary literary representations of settler colonialism is to find settlers strangely satisfied in dreaming of ends that never come. This tendency is widely prevalent in English-language representations of settler colonialism produced since the 1980s: the possibility of an ending – the likelihood that the settler race will one day die out – is a common theme in literary and pop culture considerations of colonialism’s future. Yet it has barely been remarked how surprising it is that this theme is so present. For settlers, of all people, to obsessively ruminate on their own finitude is counterintuitive, for few modern social formations have been more resistant to change than settler colonialism. With a few exceptions (French Algeria being the largest), the settler societies established in the last 300 years in the Americas, Australasia, and Southern Africa have all retained the basic features that define them as settler states – namely, the structural privileging of settlers at the expense of indigenous peoples, and the normalization of whiteness as the marker of political agency and rights – and they have done so notwithstanding the sustained resistance that has been mounted whenever such an order has been built. Settlers think all the time that they might one day end, even though (perhaps because) that ending seems unlikely ever to happen. The significance of this paradox for settler-colonial literature is the subject of this article. Considering the problem of futurity offers a useful foil to traditional analyses of settlercolonial narrative, which typically examine settlers’ attitudes towards history in order to highlight a constitutive anxiety about the past – about origins. Settler colonialism, the argument goes, has a problem with historical narration that arises from a contradiction in its founding mythology. In Stephen Turner’s formulation, the settler subject is by definition one who comes from elsewhere but who strives to make this place home. The settlement narrative must explain how this gap – which is at once geographical, historical, and existential – has been bridged, and the settler transformed from outsider into indigene. Yet the transformation must remain constitutively incomplete, because the desire to be at home necessarily invokes the spectre of the native, whose existence (which cannot be disavowed completely because it is needed to define the settler’s difference, superiority, and hence claim to the land) inscribes the settler’s foreignness, thus reinstating the gap between settler and colony that the narrative was meant to efface.1 Settler-colonial narrative is thus shaped around its need to erase and evoke the native, to make the indigene both invisible and present in a contradictory pattern that prevents settlers from ever moving on from the moment of colonization.2 As evidence of this constitutive contradiction, critics have identified in settler-colonial discourse symptoms of psychic distress such as disavowal, inversion, and repression.3 Indeed, the frozen temporality of settler-colonial narrative, fixated on the moment of the frontier, recalls nothing so much as Freud’s description of the ‘repetition compulsion’ attending trauma.4 As Lorenzo Veracini puts it, because: ‘settler society’ can thus be seen as a fantasy where a perception of a constant struggle is juxtaposed against an ideal of ‘peace’ that can never be reached, settler projects embrace and reject violence at the same time. The settler colonial situation is thus a circumstance where the tension between contradictory impulses produces long-lasting psychic conflicts and a number of associated psychopathologies.5 Current scholarship has thus focused primarily on settler-colonial narrative’s view of the past, asking how such a contradictory and troubled relationship to history might affect present-day ideological formations. Critics have rarely considered what such narratological tensions might produce when the settler gaze is turned to the future. Few social formations are more stubbornly resistant to change than settlement, suggesting that a future beyond settler colonialism might be simply unthinkable. Veracini, indeed, suggests that settler-colonial narrative can never contemplate an ending: that settler decolonization is inconceivable because settlers lack the metaphorical tools to imagine their own demise.6 This article outlines why I partly disagree with that view. I argue that the narratological paradox that defines settler-colonial narrative does make the future a problematic object of contemplation. But that does not make settler decolonization unthinkable per se; as I will show, settlers do often try to imagine their demise – but they do so in a way that reasserts the paradoxes of their founding ideology, with the result that the radical potentiality of decolonization is undone even as it is invoked. I argue that, notwithstanding Veracini’s analysis, there is a metaphor via which the end of settler colonialism unspools – the quasi-biological concept of extinction, which, when deployed as a narrative trope, offers settlers a chance to consider and disavow their demise, just as they consider and then disavow the violence of their origins. This article traces the importance of the trope of extinction for contemporary settler-colonial literature, with a focus on South Africa, Canada, and Australia. It explores variations in how the death of settler colonialism is conceptualized, drawing a distinction between historio-civilizational narratives of the rise and fall of empires, and a species-oriented notion of extinction that draws force from public anxiety about climate change – an invocation that adds another level of ambivalence by drawing on ‘rational’ fears for the future (because climate change may well render the planet uninhabitable to humans) in order to narrativize a form of social death that, strictly speaking, belongs to a different order of knowledge altogether. As such, my analysis is intended to draw the attention of settlercolonial studies toward futurity and the ambivalence of settler paranoia, while highlighting a potential point of cross-fertilization between settler-colonial and eco-critical approaches to contemporary literature. That ‘extinction’ should be a key word in the settler-colonial lexicon is no surprise. In Patrick Wolfe’s phrase,7 settler colonialism is predicated on a ‘logic of elimination’ that tends towards the extermination – by one means or another – of indigenous peoples.8 This logic is apparent in archetypal settler narratives like James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826), a historical novel whose very title blends the melancholia and triumph that demarcate settlers’ affective responses to the supposed inevitability of indigenous extinction. Concepts like ‘stadial development’ – by which societies progress through stages, progressively eliminating earlier social forms – and ‘fatal impact’ – which names the biological inevitability of strong peoples supplanting weak – all contribute to the notion that settler colonialism is a kind of ‘ecological process’ 9 that necessitates the extinction of inferior races. What is surprising, though, is how often the trope of extinction also appears with reference to settlers themselves; it makes sense for settlers to narrate how their presence entails others’ destruction, but it is less clear why their attempts to imagine futures should presume extinction to be their own logical end as well. The idea appears repeatedly in English-language literary treatments of settler colonialism. Consider, for instance, the following rumination on the future of South African settler society, from Olive Schreiner’s 1883 Story of an African Farm: It was one of them, one of those wild old Bushmen, that painted those pictures there. He did not know why he painted but he wanted to make something, so he made these. […] Now the Boers have shot them all, so that we never see a yellow face peeping out among the stones. […] And the wild bucks have gone, and those days, and we are here. But we will be gone soon, and only the stones will lie on, looking at everything like they look now.10 In this example, the narrating settler character, Waldo, recognizes prior indigenous inhabitation but his knowledge comes freighted with an expected sense of biological superiority, made apparent by his description of the ‘Bushman’s’ ‘yellow face’, and lack of mental self-awareness. What is not clear is why Waldo’s contemplation of colonial genocide should turn immediately to the assumption that a similar fate awaits his people as well. A similar presumption of racial vulnerability permeates other late nineteenthcentury novels from the imperial metropole, such as Dracula and War of the Worlds, which are plotted around the prospect of invasions that would see the extinction of British imperialism, and, in the process, the human species. Such anxieties draw energy from a pattern of settler defensiveness that can be observed across numerous settler-colonial contexts. Marilyn Lake’s and Henry Reynold’s account of the emergence of transnational ‘whiteness’ highlights the paradoxical fact that while white male settlers have been arguably the most privileged class in history, they have routinely perceived themselves to be ‘under siege’, threatened with destruction to the extent that their very identity of ‘whiteness was born in the apprehension of imminent loss’.11 The fear of looming annihilation serves a powerful ideological function in settler communities, working to foster racial solidarity, suppress dissent, and legitimate violence against indigenous populations who, by any objective measure, are far more at risk of extermination than the settlers who fear them. Ann Curthoys and Dirk Moses have traced this pattern in Australia and Israel-Palestine, respectively.12 This scholarship suggests that narratives of settler extinction are acts of ideological mystification, obscuring the brutal inequalities of the frontier behind a mask of white vulnerability – an argument with which I sympathize. However, this article shows how there is more to settler-colonial extinction narratives than bad faith. I argue that we need a more nuanced understanding of how they encode a specifically settler-colonial framework for imagining the future, one that has implications for how we understand contemporary literatures from settler societies, and which allows us to see extinction as a genuine, if flawed, attempt to envisage social change. In the remainder of this paper I consider extinction’s function as a metaphor of decolonization. I use this phrase to invoke, without completely endorsing, Tuck and Yang’s argument that to treat decolonization figuratively, as I argue extinction narratives do, is necessarily to preclude radical change, creating opportunities for settler ‘moves to innocence’ that re-legitimate racial inequality.13 The counterview to this pessimistic perspective is offered by Veracini, who suggests that progressive change to settler-colonial relationships will only happen if narratives can be found that make decolonization thinkable.14 This article enters the debate between these two perspectives by asking what it means for settler writers to imagine the future via the trope of extinction. Does extinction offer a meaningful way to think about ending settler colonialism, or does it re-activate settler-colonial patterns of thought that allow exclusionary social structures to persist? I explore this question with reference to examples of contemporary literary treatments of extinction from select English-speaking settler-colonial contexts: South Africa, Australia, and Canada.15 The next section of this article traces key elements of extinction narrative in a range of settler-colonial texts, while the section that follows offers a detailed reading of one of the best examples of a sustained literary exploration of human finitude, Margaret Atwood’s Maddaddam trilogy (2003–2013). I advance four specific arguments. First, extinction narratives take at least two forms depending on whether the ‘end’ of settler society is framed primarily in historical-civilizational terms or in a stronger, biological sense; the key question is whether the ‘thing’ that is going extinct is a society or a species. Second, biologically oriented extinction narratives rely on a more or less conscious slippage between ‘the settler’ and ‘the human’. Third, this slippage is ideologically ambivalent: on the one hand, it contains a radical charge that invokes environmentalist discourse and climate-change anxiety to imagine social forms that re-write settler-colonial dynamics; on the other, it replicates a core aspect of imperialist ideology by normalizing whiteness as equivalent to humanity. Fourth, these ideological effects are mediated by gender, insofar as extinction narratives invoke issues of biological reproduction, community protection, and violence that function to differentiate and reify masculine and feminine roles in the putative de-colonial future. Overall, my central claim is that extinction is a core trope through which settler futurity emerges, one with crucial narrative and ideological effects that shape much of the contemporary literature emerging from white colonial settings.

Extinction is not a metaphor… Extinction has become an emblem of Western, and white-dominated, fears about ‘the end of the(ir) world’. This scientific term is saturated with emotional potency, stretched and contorted to embody almost any nightmare, from climate change to asteroid strikes. In academic and public contexts alike, it is regularly interchanged with other terms and concepts – for instance, ‘species death’, global warming or ecological collapse. Diffused into sublime scales – mass extinctions measured in millions of (Gregorian calendar) years, a planet totalized by the threat of nuclear destruction – ‘extinction’ has become an empty superlative, one that that gestures to an abstract form of unthinkability. It teases Western subjects with images of generalized demise that might, if it gets bad enough, even threaten us, or the figure of ‘humanity’ that we enshrine as a universal. This figure of ‘humanity’, derived from Western European enlightenment ideals, emphasizes individual, autonomous actors who are fully integrated into the global market system; who are responsible citizens of nation-states; who conform to Western ideas of health and well-being; who partake of ‘culture’; who participate in democratic state-based politics; who refrain from physical violence; and who manage their ‘resources’ responsibly (Mitchell 2014). Oddly, exposure to the fear of extinction contributes to the formation and bolstering of contemporary Western subjects. Contemplating the sublime destruction of ‘humanity’ offers the thrill of abjection: the perverse pleasure derived from exposure to something by which one is revolted. Claire Colebrook detects this thrill-seeking impulse in the profusion of Western blockbuster films and TV shows that imagine and envision the destruction of earth, or at least of ‘humanity’. It also throbs through a flurry of recent best-selling books – both fiction and speculative non-fiction (see Oreskes and Conway 2014; Newitz 2013; Weisman 2008). In a forthcoming intervention, Noah Theriault and I (2018) argue that these imaginaries are a form of porn that normalizes the profound violences driving extinction, while cocooning its viewers in the secure space of the voyeur. Certainly, there are many Western scientists, conservationists and policy-makers who are genuinely committed to stopping the extinction of others, perhaps out of fear for their own futures. Yet extinction is not quite real for Western, and especially white, subjects; it is a fantasy of negation that evokes thrill, melancholy, anger and existential purpose. It is a metaphor that expresses the destructive desires of these beings, and the negativity against which we define our subjectivity. But extinction is not a metaphor: it is a very real expression of violence that systematically destroys particular beings, worlds, life forms and the relations that enable them to flourish. These are real, unique beings, worlds and relations – as well as somebody’s family, Ancestors, siblings, future generations – who are violently destroyed. Extinction can only be used unironically as a metaphor by people who have never been threatened with it, told it is their inevitable fate, or lost their relatives and Ancestors to it – and who assume that they probably never will. This argument is directly inspired by the call to arms issued in 2012 by Eve Tuck and Wayne K. Yang and more recently by Cutcha Risling-Baldy. The first, seminal piece demonstrates how settler cultures use the violence of metaphorical abstraction to excuse themselves from the real work of decolonization: ensuring that land and power is in Indigenous hands. Risling-Baldy’s brilliant follow-up extends this logic to explain how First People like Coyote have been reduced to metaphors through settler appropriation. In both cases, engagement with Indigenous peoples and their relations masks moves to innocence: acts that make it appear as if settlers are engaging in decolonization, while in fact we are consolidating the power structures that privilege us. In this series, want to show how Western, and white-dominated, discourses on ‘extinction’ appear to address the systematic destruction of peoples and other beings while enacting moves to innocence that mask their culpability and perpetuate structures of violence. As I argued in Part I of this series, extinction is an expression of colonial violence. As such, it needs to be addressed through direct decolonization, including the dismantling of settler colonial structures of violence, and the resurgence of Indigenous worlds. Following Tuck, Yang and Risling-Baldy’s lead, I want to show how and why the violences that drive extinction have come to be invisible within mainstream discourses. Salient amongst these is the practice of genocide against Indigenous peoples other than humans. …it is literally genocide. What Western science calls ‘extinction’ is not an unfortunate, unintended consequence of desirable ‘human’ activities. It is an embodiment of particular patterns of structural violence that disproportionately affect specific racialized groups. In some cases, ‘extinction’ is directly, deliberately and systematically inflicted in order to create space for aggressors, including settler states. For this reason, it has rightly been framed as an aspect or tool of colonial genocides against Indigenous human peoples. Indeed, many theorists have shown that the ‘extirpation’ of life forms (their total removal from a particular place) is an instrument for enacting genocide upon Indigenous humans (see Mazis 2008; Laduke 1999; Stannard 1994). Specifically, the removal of key sources of food, clothing and other basic materials makes survival on the land impossible for the people targeted. Nehiyaw thinker Tasha Hubbard (2014) makes a qualitatively distinct argument. She points out that the Buffalo are First People, the elder brothers of the Nehiyaw people (and other Indigenous nations – see Benton-Banai 2010). Starting in the mid-1800s, the tens of millions of buffalo that ranged across Turtle Island were nearly eliminated through strategic patterns of killing carried out by settler-state-sponsored military and commercial forces. Their killing was linked to governmental imperatives to clear and territorially annex the Great Plains by removing its Indigenous peoples. As Hubbard points out, methods of destroying buffalo herds included large-scale killing, but also the disruption of their social structures, the destruction of the ecosystems on which they rely, and the removal of calves. These acts involve each of the components of the definition of genocide enshrined in the UN Genocide Convention: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. From Hubbard’s viewpoint, rooted in Nehiyaw philosophy and ethical-legal principles, the systematic destruction of the buffalo is not like genocide, nor is it exclusively a tool for carrying out genocide against human peoples. It is genocide in its own right: an attempt to destroy a particular First People and the possibilities of its continuity. In other words, the deliberate and systematic attempt to eliminate the buffalo, enacted by settler states, simultaneously enacted genocide against Indigenous peoples and their nonhuman relatives. Genocides of Indigenous peoples (human and otherwise) continue apace in contemporary settler states, transformed into multiple manifestations. For instance, they are integral to ‘biosecurity’ strategies designed to police the biological boundaries of these states and their citizens. Laced with racializing and xenophobic rhetoric (Subramaniam 2001), strategies such as culling or planned eradications are intended to remove ‘invasive’ or ‘foreign’ life forms in order to protect ‘Native’ ones. Many of the ‘invasive’ life forms targeted for destruction were transported to unfamiliar lands through colonial patterns of settlement and global trade flows. However, this logic of elimination (Wolfe 2006) is often perverted, turned against Indigenous* beings whose flourishing impedes the expansion or consolidation of the colonial state. For instance, Deborah Bird Rose (2011 a, 2011 b) shows how this form of violence is continually waged against flying foxes, who are framed by the settler state as “pest[s] whose extinction is [deliberately] sought”. This act of elimination involves explicit genocidal ideation, or the imagination of the destruction of a people. Rose characterizes it as a “matter of imagining a world without [dingoes or flying foxes], then setting out to create it” (Rose 2011a). The Australian settler state has used multiple tactics to induce terror and preclude flourishing amongst flying foxes, from the emission of high-pitched electronic signals to smearing trees with python excrement (Rose 2011b). Indeed, in 2014, I lived near to the roosting site of a group of flying foxes in Turrbal and Jagera Country (suburban Brisbane to settlers). Such nesting places are called ‘colonies’ , reflecting a Western scientific rhetoric that frames Indigenous peoples as ‘invaders’ of the settler state. The trees that housed the nesting site backed onto a municipal facility, whose fence had been covered with barbed wire, in which many of the bats snared their wings and starved to death. This ‘security’ measure – designed to protect the facilities relied upon by urban settlers from the intrusion of flying foxes – is a powerful weapon for precluding ongoing flourishing of Indigenous other-than-human peoples. I learned from neighbours that this ‘colony’ had previously been ‘moved’ from several other sites around the city, suffering significant declines in population each time. Indeed, despite reported declines of 95% in flying fox communities in Queensland and neighbouring New South Wales, the Queensland settler state legalized the shooting of the bats in 2012 by fruitgrowers. Of course, in some cases, the elimination of life forms is not as targeted or intentional – it may take the form of land-based extractive violence, the creep of ocean acidification, the decimation of rainforests by climate change. Proponents of a Eurocentric definition of genocide could argue that these events lack intention. Indeed, within international law, intention to commit genocide is a necessary criteria for conviction. However, theorists of critical genocide studies have long argued that this definition is inadequate: it brackets out a great many of the acts, logics and structures that produce the destruction of unique peoples. According to Tony Barta, definitions of genocide that focus on ‘purposeful annihilation’, and in particular on physical killing, have “devalu[ed] all other concepts of less planned destruction, even if the effects are the same” (Barta 2000, 238). For this reason, he shifts the focus from ‘genocidal intention’ to ‘genocidal outcome’ – that is, from the abstract assignation of genocidal agency to the felt and embodied effects of eliminative violence. It is the focus on intent, he contends, that allows white Australians to imagine that their relationship with Aboriginal people is non-genocidal despite overwhelming evidence of systematic and deliberate racialized destruction over several centuries. In contrast, an approach based on ‘genocidal outcomes’ makes it possible to account for complex causality and weak intentionality – that is, for myriad acts mediated by subtle, normalized structures that, together, work to eliminate a people. I want to argue that the same logic applies to nonhuman peoples: the destruction of a life form, its relations with other beings and its possible futures is a genocidal outcome, whether or not intention can be identified. Similarly, Christopher Powell (2007) argues that, since a ‘genos’ is a “network of practical social relations, destruction of a genos means the forcible breaking down of those relationships…these effects could be produced without a coherent intent to destroy. They could result from sporadic and uncoordinated actions whose underlying connection is the production of a new society in which there is simply no room for the genos in question to exist. They might even result from well-meaning attempts to do good” (Powell 2007, 538) As I have argued elsewhere, extinction is defined by the breaking of relations and the systematic destruction of the conditions of plurality that nurture co-flourishing worlds. Whether inflicted out as a deliberate act of extirpation, or as the convergent effect of eliminative logics expressed over centuries and enormous spatial scales, extinction is the destruction of relations and the heterogenous societies they nurture. Understood in this way, ‘extinction’ is not a metaphor for genocide or other forms of large-scale violence: it is a distinct manifestation of genocide. Masking the genocidal logics that drive extinction involves several moves to innocence (Tuck and Yang 2012). Treating extinction as something short of genocide entrenches Eurocentric understandings of personhood that are limited to homo sapiens, which is itself an act of violence against these peoples. Ironically, the entrenchment of this dichotomy also enables the logic of ‘dehumanization’, in which human communities are likened to reviled nonhumans (for instance, cockroaches) in order to motivate violence against them. As I have argued elsewhere (Mitchell 2014), the logic of generalised ‘dehumanisation’ is uniquely effective in Western frameworks in which the lack of ethical status for beings other than humans removes obstacles to their mass destruction. Within worlds in which human and nonhuman persons are linked through complex systems of law, treaties, protocols and long-standing relations, this claim is illogical. Within Western settler states, however, it functions as a means of justifying ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples and their relations. In addition, by framing extinction as a problem for a universal figure of ‘humanity’ (more on this to follow…) mainstream discourses of extinction obscure its profound entwinement with race and racializing structures. These examples make it clear that eliminative violence is targeted on specific groups of people and their other-than-human relations, as defined by the aggressors. Indeed, patterns of genocidal violence extend racializing categories, hierarchies and eliminative impulses to other-than-human peoples. Just as approaching gender violence separately from race effaces their intersection, understanding extinction as distinct from race is deeply misleading. This is not only because racialized people are more likely to suffer from the effects of ‘extinction’ and other forms of environmental racism (which they are). It is also because the eliminative violence that drives extinction extend and enact race beyond the category of homo sapiens by defining particular groups against white settler norms and as threats to the settler society. To approach extinction separately from issues of race is, therefore, to miss one of its most defining features.

Genocide is almost always a premeditated act calculated to achieve the ends of its perpetrators through mass murder. Sometimes, however, genocidal consequences precede any conscious decision to destroy innocent groups to satisfy one's aims. This is most often the case in the early phases of colonial domination, where through violence, disease, and relentless pressure indigenous peoples are pushed toward extinction. With the recognition of the consequences of one's acts, however, the issue is changed: to persist is to intend the death of a people. This pattern of pressure, recognition, and persistence is typically what happened in the nineteenth century. Today, however, when indigenous groups come under pressure, the intention to destroy them is present from the outset; there are few illusions about the likely outcome. The distinction, then, between premeditated and unpremeditated genocide is not decisive, for sooner or later the genocidal is transformed into genocide. Rather than being simply an expression of passion, genocide is a rational instrument to achieve an end. While these ends have varied from perpetrator to perpetrator and, to a large extent, by historical period, they have typically included the following: revenge, conquest, gain, power, and purification/salvation. From these we can construct a grammar of motives which, in effect, asks the perpetrator: What are you trying to do and why is it so important that you are willing to sacrifice thousands, even millions of lives (including those of children) to achieve it? Formal, but nevertheless useful, answers to these questions are contained in the different types of genocide, arranged in terms of the grammar of motives. Classified in this manner, the pure types of genocide are retributive, institutional, utilitarian, monopolistic, and ideological. Retributive Genocide. Retribution may play a role in all genocide, but it does so mainly as a rationalization: it is a way of blaming the victim. Though it draws from the vocabulary of justice and of judicially administered punishment, genocide destroys persons most often for what they are rather than for anything they have done. In this sense, retribution flows from the dehumanization that has been fastened to the victims before they are attacked. As a principal motive in genocide, retribution is rare, but it does seem to figure prominently in accounts of conquerors like Chingis-khan (Genghis Khan).9 Nevertheless, it is difficult to see how the "Conqueror of the World," as he called himself, differed in his actions when inspired by revenge than he and others did when they engaged in the institutional genocide associated with warfare until about the fifteenth century. Institutional Genocide. Institutional genocide was the major source of politically sanctioned mass murder in the ancient and medieval worlds. The massacre of men, the enslavement of women and children, and, often, the razing of towns and the destruction of the surrounding countryside, were universal aspects of conquest: genocide was embedded in the very notion of warfare.10 As such, no explicit decision had to be made to commit genocide -it had become routinized. In part, institutional genocide was motivated by the desire to create terror, to display one's power, and to remove the possibility of future retaliation. But it was also due to a failure of political imagination: genocide was a substitute for politics. Instead of ruling a city or territory, extracting tribute from it, and perhaps even incorporating it into one's own system of power and authority, the society was devastated. By the late medieval period this practice had largely ended in the West (indeed, it had begun to change with the Romans, who understood that only through politics could one build an empire), yet it became a prominent part of the Crusades and was made all the more deadly because of religious passion.11 In any case, institutional genocide continued in the East with figures like Timur Lenk until the fifteenth century. For some 500 years thereafter, the genocide of conquest disappeared. It is possible, however, that both guerrilla warfare and the use of nuclear weapons signify a revival of this early form of genocide. If the means are different, the motives seem not that dissimilar, and the consequences include both widespread devastation and the massive taking of innocent life by those in authority. Utilitarian Genocide. If utility played a role in institutional genocide, it became particularly prominent in the genocide of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, when colonial domination and exploitation of indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Tasmania, parts of Africa, and elsewhere became pronounced. It has continued in the twentieth century, especially in Latin America, where Indians [indigenous people] have been subjected to genocidal attacks in the name of progress and development. Apart from the more sadistic aspects of this kind of destruction, the object has been Indian land-for the timber it contains, the minerals that can be extracted, and the cattle it can feed-and, at the turn of the century, Indian labor to harvest, under conditions of forced labor, the sap of the rubber tree.12 Richard Rubenstein has recently argued that development leads to a population "surplus," which in turn leads to programs to eliminate the superfluous population.13 What is happening with the remaining indigenous population of Latin America, and what was the fate of millions in various areas of the world earlier, has nothing, however, to do with a surplus population (whatever that is, for Rubenstein never defines his basic term). They are being killed, were killed, because of a combination of ethnocentrism and simple greed. The basic proposition contained in utilitarian genocide is that some persons must die so that others can live well. If that proposition no longer claims a large number of lives, it is because the previous genocide was so effective and the remaining tribes so small, with at most a few thousand members each. Yet precisely because of the tenacity of the assaults against them, and the small size of the groups, utilitarian genocide, although somewhat rare in the twentieth century, tends to be total.

The unchecked expansion of European nations since the sixteenth century has signalled over 400 years of significant change for the world's Indigenous' peoples. This process of colonisation did not end with the arrival of European people but persisted as European goods, European technology and European beliefs perpetuated the process of invasion. Globalisation threatens to accelerate this process of colonisation. Networks that were once restricted to individual communities, nations or continents are becoming globalised through the latest innovations in communication technologies. With the advent of these technologies and the extreme mobility of modern peoples, the geographic boundaries that formerly shaped a people's understandings of themselves and the world are collapsing. In the rhetoric of transnational corporations and markets, globalisation entails the removal of limitations, allowing the exchange of ideas across boundaries by people from all walks of life. In reality, mass tourism is shrinking the world, bringing once-distant peoples quite literally face to face. Telecommunications technologies such as the Internet are pro-viding worldwide access to identical information and entertainment, while consumers from opposite corners of the globe can purchase the same products from the same multinational corporations. Just as the introduction of cheaper, faster air travel since the 1950s has permitted younger, less wealthy travellers to reach once distant lands (Bankes 1995: 7), so too are modern communication technologies allowing many more peoples access to one another across the gulf between cultures. The Internet is the single fastest-growing medium of communication in the world. It took 75 years for 50 million people to be connected to the telephone—it took only ten years for the same number of people to be connected using the Internet (Nathan 1997). As cultural boundaries dissolve and fundamentally Western under-standings and attitudes become dominant, more and more people are conversing in the universal language of popular culture.

While the mass changes that attend these developments are commonly censured in terms of very real social problems such as the increasing commodification of culture, the entrenchment of inequality, growing feelings of insecurity and a loss of identity, Indigenous peoples are seldom considered in discussions of the `globalisation juggernaut'. While there are approximately 350 million Indigenous persons across the world, they comprise only 6 per cent of the world's population. The process of globalisation began in the West and has mainly fostered the expansion of Western ideas, values, lifestyles and technology. Globalisation creates unprecedented opportunities for people to see, hear, visit and experience, with an ease previously unimaginable. For Indigenous peoples, globalisation threatens to extend the process of colonisation begun 400 years ago, giving rise to the possibility of a new invasion. For many non-Indigenous peoples, globalisation is merely a means of opening up new markets and finding new ways of `selling' Indigenous culture. For some it provides access to a smorgasbord of cultural practices that are seen as public property to be `borrowed' at will. Certainly, globalisation makes Indigenous cultures available to a wider audience, often without that audience ever having to leave home. It deliberately invites the outsiders in. The result is that Indigenous peoples are having to fight harder on a variety of fronts to ensure their cultural survival and to find new means for asserting their rights and autonomy in the face of the new threats posed by globalisation.

These debates are still ongoing and may not be resolved anytime soon. However, there may still be hope for the protection of culture in the laws we have today. Although the current copyright and trademark laws seem rigid and inconsiderate towards non-Western cultures, it was these very same laws that helped the Navajo Nation regain what was rightfully theirs. Scafidi suggests that more Indigenous communities could take stronger control of their cultural products by commodifying and profiting off of them: "although outsiders' commodification of a cultural product without the authorization of the source community may dilute or destroy the product or its identification with the source community, limited communal commodification may instead enhance the value of the product by forestalling inferior copies and providing an authentic version" (60). While cultural arts and knowledge cannot be copyrighted, it is possible to copyright the expression of that culture in the form of merchandise.

Janet McGowan also indicates the Lanham Act and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act as two ways of ensuring the protection of Native American culture. The Indian Arts and Crafts Act is an American law that prohibits people from falsely advertising arts and crafts as being made by or affiliated with Indigenous groups. "It is illegal to market an art or craft item using the name of a tribe if a member, or certified Indian artisan of that tribe did not actually create the art or craft item" ("The Indian Arts and Crafts Act"). Another law, she suggests, is the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, which prevents people from selling misbranded food, drug, or cosmetic products. Many companies profit from using the names of Indigenous tribes or locations on their products in order to suggest exoticness or tradition. "For example, Hopi Blue Popcorn appears to violate the Food, Drug & Cosmetic Act, since it does not contain true blue corn and its label strongly suggests it is made by the Hopi or from the Hopi reservation" (McGowan). With regard to the Indian Arts and Crafts and Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Acts, anyone can file a complaint or petition for dishonesty. It can also be helpful to the indigenous communities if more people could become aware of these false advertising issues and refuse to buy the offending products. The more people value authentic Native American products, the less likely they will be attracted to culturally appropriated products.

Countless groups of indigenous people across the globe have a similar history of violence, loss, and oppression. This historical trauma creates a legacy that resonates across generations and is passed on to current generations. This well-documented phenomenon in recent years has been called historic trauma (Brave Heart, 2004; Cobb, 2006; Day, 2014; Wasserman, 2005; Weaver & Yellow Horse Brave Heart, 1999). It is estimated that during the 1930s–1940s, half of all American Indians in the United States were forced to attend boarding schools (Brave Heart, 2004; Cobb, 2006; Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways, 2011). These numbers were perhaps even greater in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Results from researchers who have attempted to measure the impact of historic trauma seem to indicate that American Indians have high levels of emotional distress including “anger, avoidance, anxiety, and depression” (Whitbeck, Adams, Hoyt, & Chen, 2004, p. 127). Researchers have only recently begun to fully understand the long-term impact on the children, families, and communities. Those peoples who have experienced genocide through war, torture, and removal experience even deeper and longer-lasting trauma (Brave Heart, 2004; Cobb, 2006). It is hard to hold on to one’s cultural practices in the face of such profound loss. When elders are killed or removed from the community, who is left to teach the traditional ways, and what effects does this loss have on health and well-being (Brave Heart, 2004; Ziibiwing Center of Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways, 2011)? Recent research has concluded that early childhood trauma can have lasting impacts and may affect developmental growth (Wasserman, 2005). These impacts are seen in the dismal health, mental health, child welfare, and other poor outcomes present in indigenous communities. “Collective trauma unfolds as an omnipresent, community wide phenomenon, while individual trauma unfolds as a personal psychological phenomenon unrelated to a collective common experience” (Red Horse et al., 2000, p. 14). Indigenous groups who have experienced disruption of traditional ways of life—loss of land, disruption of government and family systems through war and trauma—now experience food and water insecurity and have become impoverished as a result. This is directly related to the loss of traditional lifeways. For example, in India, Tiplut Nongbri writes, “it is significant that tribal poverty is highest in states where the people have lost control over land” (International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs, n.d. Retrieved from http://www.iwgia.org/). One writer links this economic instability to the loss of “access to forests and non-timber produce, and to recent decisions taken by the Indian Supreme Court empowering the government to bring all forests under working plans and evict encroachers” (International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs, n.d. Retrieved from http://www.iwgia.org/). Across the world, loss of indigenous land leads to disastrous changes to ways of life for the people who are misplaced. This includes loss of agriculture, traditional food sources on land and in the water, and forest resources. Cultural survival means being able to sustain the beliefs and worldview of one’s ancestors in order to pass them on to those that come after us. Across the world, colonizing government policies and practices were designed to alter and destroy indigenous culture and ways. In spite of all of these efforts, many indigenous peoples throughout the world have managed to retain their values and practices (Day, 2014; Rheault, 1999; Simard & Blight, 2011). These worldviews are deeply embedded in language and culture. Two Canadian indigenous researchers describe their unique worldview: It is important to understand that through an Aboriginal lens, all things are related on a spiritual level. A primary difference between Aboriginal worldview—Aki naanaagadawaabiwi and Non-Aboriginal theories of development is that everything in Aboriginal worldview—Aki naanaagadawaabiwi is based on the spirit whereas the concept of spirituality or the spirit is often overlooked in Non-Aboriginal theories of development. As stated earlier, cultural identity is deeply tied to how people sees themselves as part of the larger group with whom they share common cultural distinctiveness. This way of viewing oneself and the world around you is shaped by everyday cultural experiences and is reinforced throughout one’s life. This learning is developmental in nature, with children learning from families, their environment, and their cultural group. This sense of one’s cultural self comes from learning the social cultural norms that exist within one’s specific group (Day, 2014; Rheault, 1999; Simard & Blight, 2011). These constructs embrace cultural values, tribal language, traditional teachings passed down through centuries, ceremonies, connection to a land base, shared history, and accumulated wisdom (Cobb, 2006; Rheault, 1999; Weaver, 2001). For many indigenous cultures, worldview is relational as opposed to linear, in other words, cultural meaning is framed by experiences with family and cultural community, the surrounding ecosystem, and spiritual experiences. If one views the world through a relational manner, events are shaped by other events and relationships that are not necessarily linear. Most Native people raised within a cultural setting view the world through a relational lens (Day, 2014; Cross, 2010; Rheault, 1999). If one sees the world in a linear fashion, things seems to fall into line in a one-dimensional, logical progression. Those who see the world as linear also have a tendency to believe that individual effort can shape your course. A relational worldview takes into account unseen forces and is more accepting of “fate.” This is an important concept for social workers to understand when working with indigenous people. Cross (2010) says that for indigenous people “balance and harmony in relationships between multiple variables, including spiritual forces, make up the core of the thought system. Every event is understood in relation to all other events regardless of time, space, or physical existence. Health exists only when things are in balance and harmony” (p. 2). Children raised using a relational worldview have different experiences and perspectives on health, well-being, family, and spiritual connections. Most indigenous peoples understand the connection between health and well-being and maintaining balance within the mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical aspects of one’s life. This is important within the individual self, one’s family and extended family, and within one’s tribal community (Day, 2014; Simard & Blight, 2011). This embedded identity is how cultures maintain and thrive. Living life within one’s culture requires that children have meaningful interaction with extended family, community, and culture. “In tribal practice, family (and cultural) preservation involves bringing families in balance with community, spiritual, and other natural relationships” (Red Horse et al., 2000, p. 22). Having a cultural “home base” upon which to rely helps individuals and groups to be resilient. This cultural touchstone helps to ensure cultural survival in times of duress. Developing this cultural touchstone starts before birth, often with ceremonies and teachings about pregnancy: how to eat, how to prepare for birth, and instructions about childrearing (Lowell, Kildea, Liddle, Cox, & Paterson, 2015; Rheault, 1999). This cultural base grows throughout ones life span and is transmitted intergenerationally. For culture to survive, this must be done not only in the context of family but also in the context of a larger indigenous group. One such culture in the United States and Canada are the Anishinaabe people, who reside in southern Canada and the northern Midwest of the United States. Like many indigenous people, they have teachings about their core values called “grandfather teachings.” These are used to teach children about important ways of being in relationship with one another and the world. It takes a long time to fully understand these teachings as they are embedded in the language and culture of the Anishinaabe. But even providing a short description of them provides a glimpse into the central beliefs of the people. These teachings are (Day, 2014): wisdom— to value knowledge and learning throughout your life and from many sources love—to embrace peace and have unconditional regard for others respect—to treat others in a caring manner bravery—to act with integrity even in the face of fear honesty—to keep one’s word and behave in an honorable way humility—to know your place in the larger picture and not put yourself above the Great Spirit, animals, plants, or other life truth—to be honest with yourself and others These Anishinaabe values provide an underpinning for tribal members in shaping policy and practice. The teachers of these values are most often the elders who have learned these lessons many times over and can provide important context. As one Anishinaabe researcher stated: Without these teachers, how else can a person know how to be good? They are oral reference libraries that account for stories, legends, prophecies, ceremonies, songs, dances, language and the philosophy of the people. Elders are often held in the highest esteem in indigenous communities for the lifetime of wisdom they have acquired. Learning about ones cultural ways takes a lifetime and requires a strong community with knowledgeable elders to help the children learn their traditional ways and beliefs. This is the essence of cultural survival.

Over the last few decades there has been an outcry in the United States, Canada, and Australia for governments to do something to protect indigenous communities from the poaching of their artworks.

Naturally, indigenous peoples and advocacy groups are concerned about this problem and have sought legal avenues of redress. In an effort to prevent the appropriation and manipulation of their cultural images and texts, indigenous peoples, fighting for their cultural survival, are increasingly turning to intellectual property laws to protect their cultural heritage from external poaching.** Significantly, indigenous groups are willing to participate in the western intellectual property rights scheme from which they feel they have been excluded and therefore disadvantaged. They have invoked intellectual property laws to use as a shield to prevent further intrusions into their already pillaged culture.

Carpenter et al 09 (Kirsten Carpenter, Associate professor at the UNIVERSITY OF DENVER STURM COLLEGE OF LAW HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, J.D, Sonia K. Katyal is Associate Professor of Law, Fordham School of Law. Angela R. Riley is Professor of Law, Southwestern Law School, In Defense of Property, Yale Law Journal, April 2009—gm)

There is a quiet—and somewhat ironic—revolution underway in property law today. Though property law historically has been used to legitimize the conquest of indigenous lands, indigenous groups worldwide are now employing this same body of law to lay claim to their own cultural resources.

While sui generis protections address specific legal shortcomings, they merely accommodate customary law. Modifying the Copyright Act to incorporate, rather than separately address, these legal concepts fully recognize the value of TCEs as copyrightable material. Fusing concepts such as cultural patrimony into the fundamental tenants of copyright law would allow for an expanded understanding of authorship, as TCEs often represent this same level of cultural significance such that the community the TCE represents effectively “authored” it. This new category of authorship must operate in a limited scope, only extending to a work with such cultural significance that it exists indivisible from its holder. Following the 10th Circuit’s lead in Corrow and taking note from Australian jurisprudence, judge-made law can begin the process of recognizing communal authorship in the United States.

The current inability to identify an author because of the differences in customary notions of authorship leaves incredibly sacred Indigenous designs and garments entirely unprotected. By expanding the definition of authorship, the Copyright Act can accommodate TCEs within the existing framework, and possessing a valid copyright allows for full enjoyment of the benefits granted by the Act, such as an economic monopoly and standing to bring suit for infringement. Indigenous communities will also have the autonomy to make decisions about licensing and exploiting their designs, options foreclosed to works existing in the public domain. However, merely recognizing Indigenous designs as copyrightable only partially protects them from exploitation by mainstream fashion. To offer a wellrounded bundle of protections, the United States must explicitly recognize and enforce moral rights.

Steffe 23 (Luke Steffe, Indiana University Maurer School of Law, J.D. cum laude, Protection and Prevention: The Shortcomings of U.S. Copyright Law in Combatting Cultural Appropriation in the Fashion Industry, https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/ipt/vol12/iss3/4/, IP Theory Vol. 12: Iss. 3, Article 4, Summer 2023---gm)

A.

The unchecked expansion of European nations since the sixteenth century has signalled over 400 years of significant change for the world's Indigenous' peoples. This process of colonisation did not end with the arrival of European people but persisted as European goods, European technology and European beliefs perpetuated the process of invasion. Globalisation threatens to accelerate this process of colonisation. Networks that were once restricted to individual communities, nations or continents are becoming globalised through the latest innovations in communication technologies. With the advent of these technologies and the extreme mobility of modern peoples, the geographic boundaries that formerly shaped a people's understandings of themselves and the world are collapsing. In the rhetoric of transnational corporations and markets, globalisation entails the removal of limitations, allowing the exchange of ideas across boundaries by people from all walks of life. In reality, mass tourism is shrinking the world, bringing once-distant peoples quite literally face to face. Telecommunications technologies such as the Internet are pro-viding worldwide access to identical information and entertainment, while consumers from opposite corners of the globe can purchase the same products from the same multinational corporations. Just as the introduction of cheaper, faster air travel since the 1950s has permitted younger, less wealthy travellers to reach once distant lands (Bankes 1995: 7), so too are modern communication technologies allowing many more peoples access to one another across the gulf between cultures. The Internet is the single fastest-growing medium of communication in the world. It took 75 years for 50 million people to be connected to the telephone—it took only ten years for the same number of people to be connected using the Internet (Nathan 1997). As cultural boundaries dissolve and fundamentally Western under-standings and attitudes become dominant, more and more people are conversing in the universal language of popular culture.

While the mass changes that attend these developments are commonly censured in terms of very real social problems such as the increasing commodification of culture, the entrenchment of inequality, growing feelings of insecurity and a loss of identity, Indigenous peoples are seldom considered in discussions of the `globalisation juggernaut'. While there are approximately 350 million Indigenous persons across the world, they comprise only 6 per cent of the world's population. The process of globalisation began in the West and has mainly fostered the expansion of Western ideas, values, lifestyles and technology. Globalisation creates unprecedented opportunities for people to see, hear, visit and experience, with an ease previously unimaginable. For Indigenous peoples, globalisation threatens to extend the process of colonisation begun 400 years ago, giving rise to the possibility of a new invasion. For many non-Indigenous peoples, globalisation is merely a means of opening up new markets and finding new ways of `selling' Indigenous culture. For some it provides access to a smorgasbord of cultural practices that are seen as public property to be `borrowed' at will. Certainly, globalisation makes Indigenous cultures available to a wider audience, often without that audience ever having to leave home. It deliberately invites the outsiders in. The result is that Indigenous peoples are having to fight harder on a variety of fronts to ensure their cultural survival and to find new means for asserting their rights and autonomy in the face of the new threats posed by globalisation.