Cultural assimilation is the process in which a minority group or culture comes to resemble a society's majority group or assimilates the values,behaviors,and beliefs of another group whether fully or partially.
"Indian giver" is a pejorative expression used to describe a person who gives a "gift" and later wants it back or who expects something of equivalent worth in return for the item. It is based on cultural misunderstandings that took place between the early European colonists and the Indigenous people with whom they traded. Often,the Europeans viewed an exchange of items as gifts and believed that they owed nothing in return to the Indigenous people. On the other hand,the Indigenous people saw the exchange as a form of trade or equal exchange and so they had differing expectations of their guests.
Cultural appropriation is the adoption of an element or elements of one culture or identity by members of another culture or identity in a manner perceived as inappropriate or unacknowledged. This can be especially controversial when members of a dominant culture appropriate from minority cultures. When cultural elements are copied from a minority culture by members of a dominant culture,and these elements are used outside of their original cultural context –sometimes even against the expressly stated wishes of members of the originating culture –the practice is often received negatively. Cultural appropriation can include the exploitation of another culture's religious and cultural traditions,customs,dance steps,fashion,symbols,language,history and music.
War bonnets are feathered headgear traditionally worn by male leaders of the American Plains Indians Nations who have earned a place of great respect in their tribe. Originally they were sometimes worn into battle,but they are now primarily used for ceremonial occasions. In the Native American and First Nations communities that traditionally have these items of regalia,they are seen as items of great spiritual and political importance,only to be worn by those who have earned the right and honour through formal recognition by their people.
![<span class="mw-page-title-main">LaDonna Harris</span>[[Comanche]] social activist and politician](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/LaDonnaHarris.png)
LaDonna Vita Tabbytite Harris is a Comanche Native American social activist and politician from Oklahoma. She is the founder and president of Americans for Indian Opportunity. Harris was a vice presidential candidate for the Citizens Party in the 1980 United States presidential election alongside Barry Commoner. She was the first Native American woman to run for vice president. In 2018,she became one of the inductees in the first induction ceremony held by the National Native American Hall of Fame.
Smudging,or other rites involving the burning of sacred herbs or resins,is a ceremony practiced by some Indigenous peoples of the Americas. While it bears some resemblance to other ceremonies and rituals involving smoke from other world cultures,notably those that use smoke for spiritual cleansing or blessing,the purposes and particulars of the ceremonies,and the substances used,can vary widely among tribes,bands,and nations,and even more so among different world cultures. In traditional communities,Elders maintain the protocols around these ceremonies and provide culturally specific guidance.
In Navajo culture,a skin-walker is a type of harmful witch who has the ability to turn into,possess,or disguise themselves as an animal. The term is never used for healers.
Two-spirit is a contemporary pan-Indian umbrella term used by some Indigenous North Americans to describe Native people who fulfill a traditional third-gender social role in their communities.
Sharon Stewart-Peregoy is an American politician serving as a Democratic member of the Montana House of Representatives. She was first elected to the Montana House of Representatives in 2017,and represents House District 42. From 2009 to 2017,she served in Montana Senate,and represented Senate District 21,which included Crow Agency,Montana. She was a member of the Senate's American Indian Caucus. She received a Bachelor of Arts in elementary education from Montana State University and a Master of Education from City University at Seattle. She actively advocates for the revitalization of the Crow language and culture.
Beatrice Medicine was a scholar,anthropologist,and educator known for her work in the fields of Indigenous languages,cultures,and history. Medicine spent much of her life researching,teaching,and serving Native communities,primarily in the fields of bilingual education,addiction and recovery,mental health,tribal identity,and women's,children's,and LGBT community issues.
Native Appropriations is a blog that criticizes and analyzes the ways that Indigenous people are depicted in mainstream culture. Active since 2010,the website is created and maintained by Cherokee Nation scholar Adrienne Keene.
Redface is the wearing of makeup to darken or redden skin tone,or feathers,warpaint,etc. by non-Natives to impersonate a Native American or Indigenous Canadian person,or to in some other way perpetuate stereotypes of Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States. It is analogous to the wearing of Blackface. In the early twentieth century,it was often white performers,who wore blackface or redface when portraying Plains Indians in Hollywood Westerns. In the early days of television sitcoms,"non-Native sitcom characters donned headdresses,carried tomahawks,spoke broken English,played Squanto at Thanksgiving gatherings,received 'Indian' names,danced wildly,and exhibited other examples of representations of redface".
Matika Wilbur,is a Native American photographer and educator from Washington state. She is an enrolled citizen of the Tulalip Tribes of Washington and a descendant of the Swinomish people. She is best known for her photography project,Project 562.
Candice Hopkins is a Carcross/Tagish First Nation independent curator,writer,and researcher who predominantly explores areas of art by Indigenous peoples. She is the executive director and chief curator at the Forge Project in New York.
#NODAPL,also referred to as the Dakota Access Pipeline protests,is a Twitter hashtag and social media campaign for the struggle against the proposed and partially built Dakota Access Pipeline. The role social media played in this movement is so substantial that the movement itself is now often referred to by its hashtag:#NoDAPL. The hashtag reflected a grassroots campaign that began in early 2016 in reaction to the approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the northern United States. The Standing Rock Sioux and allied organizations took legal action aimed at stopping construction of the project,while youth from the reservation began a social media campaign which gradually evolved into a larger movement with dozens of associated hashtags. The campaign aimed to raise awareness on the threat of the pipeline on the sacred burial grounds as well as the quality of water in the area. In June 2021,a federal judge struck down the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe's lawsuit,but left the option of reopening the case should any prior orders be violated.
Lenore Keeshig-Tobias is an Anishinabe storyteller,poet,scholar,and journalist and a major advocate for Indigenous writers in Canada. She is a member of the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation. She was one of the central figures in the debates over cultural appropriation in Canadian literature in the 1990s. Along with Daniel David Moses and Tomson Highway,she was a founding member of the Indigenous writers' collective,Committee to Reestablish the Trickster.
Aaron Yazzie is a Diné(Navajo) mechanical engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His work involves planetary sample acquisition and handling. He has worked on the Mars Science Laboratory,InSight,and Mars 2020 missions.
Rebecca Sockbeson is a Wabanaki scholar and activist in the field of Indigenous Peoples' education.
In the terminology of linguistic anthropology,linguistic racism, both spoken and written,is a mechanism that perpetuates discrimination,marginalization,and prejudice customarily based on an individual or community's linguistic background. The most evident manifestation of this kind of racism is racial slurs;however,there are covert forms of it. Linguistic racism also relates to the concept of "racializing discourses," which is defined as the ways race is discussed without being explicit but still manages to represent and reproduce race. This form of racism acts to classify people,places,and cultures into social categories while simultaneously maintaining this social inequality under a veneer of indirectness and deniability.
Marie Mason Potts was a Mountain Maidu cultural leader,activist,educator,writer,journalist,and editor. She was an influential California Native American activist who travel lectured on tribal sovereignty,heritage,and cultural preservation. Potts had authored two books,"The Northern Maidu" (1971) and "Honey Run Bridge". She was also known as Chankutpan,"One With Sharp Eyes",and née Marie Mason.
