Popular Media

If you are Native or part Native and you want to find your people in popular media, you may need to work at it.

I knew someone at one time who was a walking, talking encyclopedia of every TV show, movie, music group etc. from their region of the world. I could have started a blog about that region just by writing down anything he referenced in public media. I'm not aware of any resource akin to that for Native culture.

The group Black Eyed Peas probably looks to a lot of people like two Black guys, a Hispanic guy and a White woman. Reality: The group includes a man who is part Shoshone and seemingly identifies as Native American (if Wikipedia is to be believed) plus a Filipino man.

Filipino is a mix of Asian and Spanish. They typically have Hispanic names and are frequently interpreted as Hispanic. People somewhat often miss the Asian influence.

I like this video by them because I feel it reads as more multicultural than some of their stuff.

Redbone isn't simply a "hippy era 70s band" like I once imagined. It's a mostly Native American, all non-white band and one of their big hits -- the song Come and Get Your Love -- doesn't simply reflect relaxed sexual attitudes of the hippy era, it reflects a validation of female sexuality found in Native culture that helped me put down a lot of my baggage. I've written about that previously elsewhere.

I wrote a piece about Three Movies with Native Characters. One of those movies is called Beyond the Law and the main character is half Native which is a critical plot point and Wikipedia glosses over that and describes it as a troubled childhood.

It's based on a true story, so the Native identity of the main character isn't just made up to sound like a good explanation and one of its alternate titles is Fixing the Shadow which references Native mythology and the psychological journey of the main character in coming to terms with his Native heritage.

I'm only a very small part Native. I'm happy to talk about what little I know but one of the problems the Native community has is you remain invisible in mainstream culture even if you are literally the star of the show and your Native identity is a central plot point of the story. Things that talk about it routinely leave that out.

I'm a small part Native. On Cyburbia, someone made some asshole remark along the lines of White people being interested in Native culture in a fetishizing fashion and I pointed out that I'm part Cherokee and the other blond chick in the discussion talking about Natives was part Blackfoot.

We were interested because it's a part of OUR heritage that we were largely cut off from. Not because we are White.

So I was interested in the movie Beyond the Law in part because of that angle and you can bet money there are other Americans "too White" for Natives to want to associate with who also watch movies like that out of interest in their own heritage that no one wants to let them connect with any other way.

If -- as has been posted on this blog -- the majority of Americans have some Native blood, then that's potentially upwards of 165 million people who might watch such a movie solely because of the Native elements and you fools in marketing are leaving out that potential hook.