Hello everyone! It is November, which means it is Native American Heritage Month! As you probably tell by the timing of this post, we will be doing this event a little differently compared to other events. Due to the unfortunate lack of representation relative to the other months we will instead focus more on songs and artists that we would like to see in the series instead songs that are already here, specifically music recommendations and mashups. We will still be accepting art, but with additional rules below.
As far as I can tell, we only have one artist of Native American descent this year and that would be The Ronettes, as they are part Cherokee. They appear to be our only verifiable artists of Native American descent, unless we start going way up family trees and bring in artists who are like 1/16 indigenous or artists who have made unverified claims of being part indigenous. As for on screen representation we also don’t have much here either. There’s Apache (Jump On It), but that feels more like appropriation as the song is not by an indigenous artist (I blame the artist more than Ubisoft for that).
So for this month we will doing one blog that covers the lack of representation, what little we have, and what we would like to see. Specifically we will primarily be accepting music recommendations and fanmade mashups to songs by Native American artists. We will also be accepting art but in order to avoid falling into offensive stereotypes or appropriation we ask that you stick to the source material and draw content directly from the music video and not just stick a headdress on someone or slap a song title onto something unrelated. The same other rules apply:
No AI
No stolen artwork
No explicit or NSFW content (including lyrics in mashups)
Art must relate to the month
Do not draw appropriated characters (i.e., Apache (Jump On It)) unless you are capable of reclaiming the character (such as if you are Apache yourself or can draw a culturally accurate version for a song by an Apache artist)
Please stick to the source material to avoid inadvertently falling into stereotypes and please check that the artist is actually indigenous.
Please do not just slap a Native title on some random art and do not slap a headdress on a random dancer.
