‘A ceaseless interchange’

In 1836, a Comanche raiding party struck a family compound near present-day Groesbeck, Texas. The Comanches slaughtered all the men of Parker’s Fort—some by torture—and carried off two women and three children. Cynthia Ann Parker, about 9 years old when she was kidnapped, adopted the tribe that adopted her, married a war chief named Peta Nocona, and had three children by him. In 1860 Texas Rangers captured a Comanche woman with blue eyes—the long-lost Cynthia Ann. Returned to her white relatives along with her daughter, she never reassimilated; shortly after her little girl succumbed to pneumonia, Cynthia Ann died of what might be called a broken heart.

But the saga doesn’t end there. Her oldest son, Quanah, became a noted Comanche raider who pillaged white settlements with abandon until he could read the writing on the wall—more accurately, on the dwindling buffalo herd. After surrendering to the U.S. Army in 1875, he tracked down his white relatives and made peace—not only with them but with their society. He built a ranch, bought part-interest in a railroad, earned and lost lots of money, counted Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Goodnight among his friends. He ended his days in a white frame house surrounded by teepees, a tangible bridge between peoples.

That’s how culture works: As Alan Jacobs puts it, culture is “a ceaseless interchange of ideas, visions, experiences, and techniques.” It’s an interchange too often facilitated by violence and tragedy, as Quanah Parker and his mother well knew, but that’s only part of the story. From the narrative currently hardening on college campuses and websites across the nation, though, violence and tragedy are the whole story.

It goes something like this: Culture is what my people did and thought, until your people tried to stomp it, and us, into extinction. My culture survived your culture’s oppression, but now you want to capture it for your own benefit.

At its best, culture is the continual project of community-building.

The current term for this outrage is “cultural appropriation.” For example: J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, could do no wrong among her fans until, in connection with her book Fantastic Beasts & Where to Find Them, she invented a magical history of North America complete with Native American legends and mythical figures. That wasn’t so bad in itself, but Rowling also created an Irish magician who arrived on these shores circa 1300 and taught the natives more sophisticated European techniques. Howls of protest echoed from this side of the Atlantic: This was colonialism all over again, or worse, commodification. On a website for Native American voices, Loralee Sepsey wrote, “She has no right to appropriate our cultures for her own profit.” Rowling should apologize, at the very least.

Another example: At the Black Entertainment Television Awards on June 26, Jesse Williams, star of Grey’s Anatomy, accepted the 2016 BET Humanitarian Award for his civil rights activism. Trophy in hand, he let loose with a sizzling speech about “a system [i.e., white society] built to divide and impoverish and destroy us.” The system’s many crimes include “extracting our culture, our dollars, our entertainment like oil, black gold. Ghettoizing and demeaning our creations then stealing them. …”

Oppression is intrinsic to this view of culture. In some Native American circles it sounds like perpetual mourning; among some African-Americans, perpetual rage. But the object of this rage and mourning is not entirely clear, because both cultures have changed in countless untraceable ways since their entanglement with “the Other.” How much have Indian legends been romanticized by the (mostly white) anthropologists who wrote them down? What would Black Entertainment look like without the technology to record and amplify it? Where would you freeze the evolution of a culture and say, “This is it”?

Alan Jacobs again: “Appropriation is what culture does.” It’s the unfolding solution to the one vs. many problem of defining our individual selves in relation to the world around us. At its best, culture is the continual project of community-building. Cries of “Appropriation!” are one of the many wounds that weaken its vulnerable fabric.

Email jcheaney@wng.org