The oppressor consciousness tends to transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination. The earth, property, production, the creations of people, people themselves, time— everything is reduced to the status of objects at its disposal.
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
When radicals practice appropriation of Native American and indigenous cultures, they are participating in the systems of slavery and genocide— Genocide of the Mind.
Like strip mining or oil drilling, cultural appropriation extracts cultural artifacts from the soil of their community-based traditions, so that they can be sold and commodified in a capitalist way.
Cultural appropriation is a process of colonization and extractive industry. “Discovering" the culture, "taking" it from its native people, and finally "owning" it like a trophy of war. Where real cultural identity is based on an idea of inheritance from a personal community, cultural appropriation is based on a capitalist idea of objective ownership.
This is the same thing that happens when a logging company cuts down the forest. A Native American community in that forest doesn’t view the forest in terms of monetary ownership— they view it in terms of inheritance from their ancestors, as part of a cultural identity. To the foreign logging company, those trees aren’t part of a cultural identity. They are merely dollar signs, objects to be extracted, owned, and sold.
If, as the philosophies of Environmental Justice and Deep Ecology hold, people and planet are one in the same, indivisible, then cultural appropriation is an extractive industry, like mountaintop removal or logging of an old-growth forest. It is part of a system of colonization, genocide, and environmental destruction.
As Freire says, “Apart from direct, concrete, material possession of the world, and of people, the oppressor consciousness could not understand itself— could not even exist.”
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