Cultural Imperialism and the Marketing of Native America

Abstract

INTRODUCTION\nIn 1992, mainstream Euro-America demonstrated the short, selective, and sanitized character of both the national memory and the official history that sustains it by celebrating an anniversary: the Columbus Quincentenary, the ”discovery”of the ”New World.” The vast majority of activities generated by this event were festive and culturally self-congratulatory. Yet there were powerful subcurrents of protest, indigenous and otherwise, in wide evidence, contesting the sharply edited, profoundly revisionist nature of the commemoration. They drove home the moral and methodological implications of the fact that history is not only written from a particular standpoint, but that that standpoint has been of the colonizers, not the colonized. The response of Native America was also a determined assertion of presence and continuity, pointedly captured by the defiant counter spilling over with t-shirts, posters and bumper stickers: “Still Here! Celebrating 49,500 years . . . before Columbus.”\nPartly as a result of these cultural dynamics, the writing of history has become more problematic within the general public’s awareness. Some began openly to question longstanding practices, notably the racist dimensions of the continued stereotyping of Indian people by Hollywood, the media, and the sporting world. Yet many deeply disturbing aspects of contemporary Western/indigenous cultural relations were left largely unexamined and unquestioned. One of these is a particularly virulent form of cultural imperialism-the marketing of Native America and, most tellingly, of native spirituality.

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