The winner is.... Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
On March 27th 1973 Apache and Yaqui actress and activist Sacheen Littlefeather ascended the stage at the Academy Awards.
Amidst a mixture of cheers and boos from the evening’s attendees, Littlefeather read a portion of a prepared statement on behalf of that year’s best actor winner, Marlon Brando.
She declined the award on Brando’s behalf, stating his reason for turning his back on Hollywood’s highest honor: the movie industry’s continued misrepresentation of Native American people in film.
Littlefeather was there in his stead to draw attention to the American Indian Movement and to shine light on the issue of cultural appropriation in film.
Cultural appropriation.
Although the phrase and the practices it describes are familiar to most of us, it can feel ambiguous.
And that’s primarily because while inappropriate or offensive uses of other cultures are often quite obvious, the subtleties of the conversation are usually drowned out by protests that appreciation cannot be appropriation.
The actual phrase “cultural appropriation” first appeared in print in 1945 attributed to the late professor Arthur E Christy, and it’s been a topic of very heated debate ever since.
As a term, cultural appropriation has its roots in the latter half of the 20th century with its highest usage coming after 1980.
Although the concept of stealing or misusing a culture was on our collective radar form the 19th century onwards.
And marginalized groups have been speaking up against cultural appropriation that either diminishes or sidelines the contributions of the people who created certain practices.
But at the heart of these conversations are three daunting and often amorphous concepts: First, what even is culture?
How does power operate in relationship to culture?
And what are the boundaries between participating versus appropriating another culture?
So before we get into the debate of whether or not culture can be appropriated and misused, we should start with the basics, namely: what is culture?
Well as a cultural historian myself, I’m going to tip my hat to 20th century theorist Raymond Williams’ 1976 definition of culture.
According to Williams, our modern use of culture exists largely under three main umbrellas: First there are the “intellectual and spiritual and aesthetic development” realms of culture that encompass shared ideologies and beliefs.
This is probably the least tangible portion of culture.
Two good examples are the concepts of a shared faith or patriotism.
Both have a fixed set of values and ideas attached to them, and can inspire cultural production.
But they are also ideologies that exist even if they aren’t being actively enacted.
So you can feel patriotism, even when you’re not actively performing a ritual that displays it.
Just like you can experience shared faith, even when you are not engaging in religious ceremonies.
Then there’s the portion of culture that covers the shared way of life of a defined group of people (meaning the way that a fixed group interacts and lives in accordance with their common ideologies).
This can be very specific, like the shared lifestyle of one finite group of people, or extremely expansive, like a shared reality that extends between all of humanity.
So (as far as we know) all humans share the earth.
All humans, in order to survive, must eat.
But the way we live on earth, whether in a large city or in a rural community, is defined by the people were are directly engaging with on a daily basis.
And the third and final category of culture that Williams describes (and the one we’ll talk about the most today) is related to shared creative and artistic productivity.
This includes the art, literature, music, films, songs, and general representation of a given culture or group of people.
Cultural production is the most concrete portion of culture because it gives us objects and often physical items to look at and engage with.
So although this all may seem a bit dense, it’s helpful to think about culture like a series of concentric circles radiating outward.
from the center.
And you're the center.
In the first circle are the things closest to us, like ideologies, because they exist largely in our minds.
Then we have shared ways of life or things that we engage in with the people directly around us.
And in the farthest circle is cultural production, or the objects, artworks, and creations that express our culture and that we shuttle out in to the world.
And being farthest away from the center, that’s also the sphere most prone to traveling far away from its original context and therefore being taken up elsewhere.
And now that we’ve briefly waded through the waters of what exactly culture is, you’ve probably found the underlying connective tissue of these three spheres.
Namely that culture is shared...and big and constantly occurring.
Plus it’s a bit like language because it needs a collective of people to make a shared meaning.
So often when people argue against the existence of cultural appropriation, the basis of the argument is centered on culture’s shared nature, since something that is shared isn’t owned by one particular person.
But there’s a weakness in this argument of ownership that stems from the way we think about possession.
Some forms of ownership are rather straightforward and therefore easier to understand.
If you go out and purchase a car, you have sole ownership of the car and are entitled to all of its benefits (like faster and more convenient transportation) in addition to all of its drawbacks (like pesky car repairs).
But ownership of culture doesn’t operate that way because it belongs to the group that the culture stems from, and not one discrete person or persons.
And as professor Susan Scafidi notes in her book “Who Owns Culture?” there are legal challenges when thinking of discrete ownership in relationship to cultural products.
Legal protections like copyright or trademarking rely on a stable cultural product with a set number of creators.
Like a song with a fixed list of songwriters.
But culture is constantly evolving and changing.
So Scafidi warns that patenting an idea that is shared among a group “may provoke ossification of a culture and its artifacts.” But despite the difficulty of codifying cultural ownership in legal terms, there are ways that culture can be appropriated or misused once it’s divorced from its original context.
People who are against believing that cultural appropriation even exists often say that America is a “melting pot” of various cultures, and therefore no one should be allowed to lay ownership to any particular form of expression.
As Scafidi also notes: “Indeed, the tension-filled history of American immigration and even internal migration indicates that the cultural products of others are often easier to accept and assimilate than the individuals (or huddled masses) themselves.” And that’s because people’s admiration for the cultural products they consume (like music, art, literature, and fashion) can exist quite separately from the real world treatment of the people whose culture they’re appropriating from.
Because at the heart of cultural appropriation isn’t just a cultural object, but power.
Appropriation happens when you have a position of power or are a member of a dominant culture who is able to take the parts of a marginalized culture that you enjoy; divorce them from their original meaning; and use them for entertainment value without considering their original context or having to deal with the negative ramifications that someone from that culture would have to deal with as a result of that same action.
So while it may seem benign to the person who is extracting and enjoying the culture, the resulting damage can have real world implications for the people whose culture has been misrepresented or misused.
So let’s return to the 1973 Academy Awards.
Although, in large part, Sacheen Littlefeather’s disruption of the ceremony and Marlon Brando’s absence were meant to draw attention to the specific issue of Native American representation in film, the longer statement that the actor released after the broadcast pointed to larger cultural issues.
Brando wrote in the full statement that was published in newspapers after the ceremony that his decision wasn’t only about the movies being made and the way that Native American cultures had been appropriated and distorted, but also the real world issues that arose from this systematic mischaracterization.
Of Littlefeather’s appearance at the award show: “Perhaps at this moment you are saying to yourself what the hell has all this got to do with the Academy Awards?
Why is this woman standing up here, ruining our evening, invading our lives with things that don't concern us, and that we don't care about?
.....
I think the answer to those unspoken questions is that the motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing him as savage, hostile and evil.
It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world.
When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.” Brando also noted that at the time the 1973 Oscars were occurring, the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota had been occupied by American Indian Movement members, who were met with military forces.
The town also has historical significance because it's the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, where an estimated 150-300 Lakota Sioux were killed by US troops.
So the decision to represent Native American cultures in movies as inherently violent and untamable also served as a way of appropriating culture and misaligning history.
To Littlefeather and Brando’s point: the pleasure American audiences got from watch old Westerns didn’t outweigh the damage caused by cultural appropriation and misrepresentation.
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