Open Letter to Aaron Huey: Regarding Interpersonal and Media Colonialism

[Defend the Sacred]

Maybe you've seen the poverty porn photographer Aaron Huey has made about Pine Ridge. Apparently he also photographed ceremony, and is making money off these photos he never should have taken. As if that weren't violation enough, when NDN women on twitter have critiqued his work, among themselves, he has intruded on their conversations to insult them and promote himself as an arbiter of NDN experience. This is an excellent response to him, analyzing the abuse of white privilege and the commodification of NDN spiritual experience, by Kelleigh Driscoll. Thanks to Ryan Red Corn for passing this along.

http://americanamnesiac.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/open-letter-to-aaron-huey-regarding-interpersonal-and-media-colonialism/

Open Letter to Aaron Huey: Regarding Interpersonal and Media Colonialism

Just a few quotes:

"Your projects on the Lakota Nation provoke many questions. For example, why is it that you felt depicting ceremony was so indispensable to your project? Ceremony is sacred and intimate, and at the same time, it is a focus of fetishization and commodification by non-Natives. It is not necessary to document ceremony and expose it to that fetishization in order to represent Pine Ridge positively. In spite of  hardship and material poverty, the place is electric with life, laughter, endurance, growth, love, and power, not just in ceremony but in the unsung mundane moments of everyday life. Did you skip the gatherings that occur after ceremony, where people talk and joke and reminisce with their families and friends? They are much less exotic, and less marketable than the ceremony itself, but just as telling of the profound bonds, support, and tradition that exist in the community.

"What about the poets, the artists and fashion designers creating breathtaking contemporary work from their traditional techniques and aesthetics, or the competitive dancers who bead their own regalia, or the rodeo riders and basketball players? Did you miss the Oglala Nation college where community members can get practical degrees, and educations based on their traditional ways? Or the Tanka factory where modern pemmican is manufactured and shipped all over the United States and beyond?

"Every aspect of Lakota life reveals the resurgence of their nation, and the coexistence of old and modern ways, yet you captured and shared the one thing you were explicitly told was not to be captured and shared. When you published those intimate moments and harnessed them to "redeem" the Lakota from the box your first project put them in, you took advantage of the generosity that was granted to you when you were permitted to even enter that sacred space. I submit that, whether you were conscious of it or not, this focus on ceremony is related to the marketability of Native peoples to non-Native audiences as an exotic commodity."

Read the whole thing (it's well worth it): http://americanamnesiac.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/open-letter-to-aaron-huey-regarding-interpersonal-and-media-colonialism/