Native American Pop Culture

Pop Culture and Natives
Honestly majority of my cultural identity is based on pop culture.The reason for this is because I never got deep into my cultures. I never celebrated true traditions of my culture’s, and I’m okay with that. But throughout my 15 years of life there has always been this issue that I never wanted to acknowledge and it’s that there are no true representation of Native American in general, or no Native American role models for me to look up too. This made me feel that my whole existence is irrelevant; I am nothing special because I am a little Native girl. The media always misrepresent Natives and never showcase the great things that Natives do.

Amongst all of the readings that we read for this unit the one line that will always stick with me is the line from ‘Magic Carpet’. “Slowly,

insidiously I began to judge my heritage…” This one specific line I related to the most because I understand how she feels hating who she is.

Growing up I felt different because I didn’t feel normal. If I were to say “Hi, I’m Erika and I’m Native” I would have to go through an abundance of other questions of “What tribe are you apart of?” Or my favorite “Did you grow up on the reservations?”. This is my favorite simply because if I say I’m Native that automatically means I grew up on the reservation because that was the stereotype of Natives. We acted a certain way. We dressed one way, we always lived in little huts of some sorts or little houses and had long black hair. Even the boys did. Although I did in fact embrace that stereotype growing up, I mean, even now I want to go back to long hair because the media made it seem like, in order for you to be

considered Native you have to have to be like Pocahontas with her long straight black hair, tall and slim. Whereas I’m short, medium length hair, that is black as Pocahontas's but it’s curly. As a result of that I slowly began to hate myself because I wasn’t that. All of these stereotypes and these ideas of Natives just kept building up inside me and crushing me slowly and my hatred just grew bigger and bigger. I remember one time I heard non-Native girls get told they look more like Pocahontas than me. That made me begin to hate who I was. Or who I thought I wasn’t. Just with the media having this constant mindset of what they thought was the ‘normal’ Native, it ruined me.

Growing up I really didn’t like identifying as Native for several reasons. One main reason was because it was sorta irrelevant in life. What I mean by that is if you were to ask people to list important historical figures, chances are none of them would be Native. Majority of them would be white, some African American, maybe a pinch of Hispanics but hardly any Natives. I myself would not be able to tell any role models for Native people, because we don’t learn about them. The history books hardly talk about them, media just likes using natives as fashion statement or a way to describe exotic looking women who majority of the time aren’t native other than that Natives are just flat out ignored. That’s just mind blowing on how we fight for equality for everyone but Natives are still ignored. I’ve grown up with hearing that African Americans are beautiful, Asians are beautiful, Latina’s are beautiful and so on and so forth. But never heard about Natives. So I began to just purely identify as Mexican because it was easier and I felt apart of something important. I guess now I still like identifying as Mexican because it’s easier still. It will always be easier.