Live Action Avatar: The Last Airbender cast a white person to play Sokka.
The live action ATLA was priding itself on casting actual Asian and Indigenous actors to play Asian and Indigenous characters, but it’s recently come to light that Ian Ousley, the actor they cast to play Sokka, claims to be Cherokee. And yet he is not an enrolled member of any of the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes.
@7genvoices on twitter even went through the trouble of contacting each of the three tribes asking for his enrollment status.
He is, instead, an “enrolled member” of the Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky. A FAKE tribe that has, for at least the last 10 years, been a detriment to the reputation and livelihood of actual Cherokee Nation folks. From going to their website, it’s very clear that they are fake. While the 3 federally recognized tribes have extensive vetting processes to amke sure fakers cannot be citizens of our sovereign nation, the “Southern Cherokee Nation of Kentucky” requires an oral testament, or proof of Native American DNA, which NO FEDERALLY RECOGNIZED TRIBES ACCEPT.
Additionally, Ian Ousley seems to be RELATED to one of the leaders of this “tribe”.
There are a NUMBER of fake tribes that can be found here (and there are even more small ones that are not listed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unrecognized_tribes_in_the_United_States
This roll could’ve, should’ve, and maybe still can go to an actual indigenous actor. Frankly, I felt weird hearing that he was “Cherokee” and being cast to play a character who is clearly designed to be Inuit or other more northern indigenous culture, but this really is the nail in the coffin.
What can we do about it?
You can retweet this and make sure to tag @ianlukeousley and Netflix!
You can sign this petition on change.org!
You can reblog this and bring it to the attention of others.
Thank you for reblogging this and spreading the word. It means a lot.
