The Indians behind glass:
Late fall is Indian history season, Veronica Pasfield says knowingly. In the run-up to Thanksgiving, public schools always teach kids about Native Americans. In November 2001, Pasfield’s son’s third-grade class in Ann Arbor, Michigan, started a unit about a Great Lakes people called the Potawatomi. They visited the Great Lakes Indians dioramas in what was then called the Exhibit Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor for their final activity.
Afterward, the boy illustrated the cover of his folder that contained all the worksheets from his unit on the Potawatomi Indians. He drew three deep graves with skeletons at the bottom and tombstones that said “R.I.P.”
“This was devastating to me as a mother,” Pasfield says, “because my son is an enrolled tribal member.” The family belongs to the Bay Mills Indian Community. They are also Anishinabe, a grouping that includes the Potawatomi. “He has been ritualized properly for his age. He has been a participant in ceremony his entire life.” They had taken him to language classes. He had helped build a community canoe. Yet something about seeing the Exhibit Museum’s wall of glassed-in, miniature Great Lakes dioramas made him think of death.
A very sad RIP to Leslie Feinberg:
Leslie Feinberg, who identified as an anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, died on November 15.
Julia Wong on “Serial” (no i still haven’t listened i know, but that’s no reason you cannot have your own sprightly disagreements!):
But in the latest episode of Serial, “The Deal with Jay,” my reaction to Koenig and her all-white production team’s attempts to portray non-white subjects tipped from discomfort to distress. The episode provides the series’ first in-depth discussion of Jay, a black friend of Adnan’s on whose testimony the entire case rests. The problem of Jay’s inconsistent but damning testimony has been teased since the beginning of the podcast — Adnan is only innocent if Jay is lying. Koenig’s treatment of Jay provides the ugly counterpoint to her portrayal of Adnan and Hae. In Episode 8, it becomes clear that Koenig is deploying another classic racial trope — that of the “model minority.”
Remember the “Poor Teeth” essay? Here’s a great interview with the author:
Most journalists, I’d wager, don’t have direct experience with poverty but are somewhat aware of their own privilege, and that translates to treating reporting of poverty preciously and yet at a distance—this pity tone, which is just an indirect outlet for their own fears and biases. Do you think you’re telling the untold story because you drove your own car into the ghetto to get some quotes and a few shots of shivering children for a 10-inch write-up on the cost of natural gas and a family who had their heat turned off? If you’d stuck around you might have seen that family build an electric-blanket fort in the middle of the living room, huddle over a game of Monopoly and crack up all night long about how screwed they are. You’re not qualified to pity anyone, and you’re not necessarily envied in the ways that matter most.
Azaria Chamberlain was killed by a dingo and your jokes are not funny and what happened to the Chamberlains IS REALLY FUCKING SAD:
The Chamberlain saga managed to find a niche in American pop culture. It was the case that launched a thousand quips, on shows like “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons,” and in the 2008 film “Tropic Thunder.” That unfamiliar word, dingo, had something to do with it. So did a 1988 film, “A Cry in the Dark,” in which Meryl Streep resorted to another of her many foreign accents to play Lindy Chamberlain. The mother’s cry, “The dingo’s got my baby,” became a punch line, usually rendered in a mock Australian accent as “The dingo ate my baby.”
Yeah, they know it’s Christmas.
