Perhaps November was selected for Native American Heritage Month because it coincides with the Thanksgiving Holiday, one of the main events in which children come to understand who we are as Americans. As Native mothers, we know that Thanksgiving is fraught with exposing our kids to stereotypes about Native Peoples. (To learn more about these stereotypes, see this webisode our team created for PBS Learning media). Our team at Bioneers have been working together to unpack what Thanksgiving means and how we can all be a part of transforming it into a holiday that celebrates all our histories. Check out the resources we have developed here (and share them widely)! 

Over the past few decades, Native American/American Indian/Alaska Natives have been fighting to represent ourselves in the media to combat negative stereotypes. Recently, we have made great strides with Indigenous-produced movies, television, radio and podcasts. This is particularly poignant for myself, as my grandmother was featured as an uncredited “Eskimo” in 1920s Hollywood films, during a fascination with the “arctic” as a “last frontier.” 

Crystal Echo Hawk’s leadership with IllumiNative has been a staunch advocate for a broader public understanding of the damages that one-sided media has caused our Native communities, evidencing it with groundbreaking public data, and explaining it in a way that everyone can understand. 

This is a story about Native Peoples as we are changing the ways that we are seen today, but there is also a broader lesson to learn about how the media depicts and vilifies underexposed and misunderstood populations who are discriminated against. For Thanksgiving this year, I hope that all Americans can focus on this teaching. 

The following conversation between Crystal and Bioneers Indigeneity Program Co-Director Cara Romero is taken from the first episode of the Indigeneity Conversations podcast series.

-Alexis Bunten, Indigeneity Program Co-Director 

Crystal Echo Hawk, IllumiNative: As Native Peoples, we’ve all carried this duality: We feel very much unseen and unheard in society. We feel very invisible. But at the same time, if we are visible, then we’re just caricatures. We’re the stereotypes. We’re some other sort of representation that is not of our own making. 

I remember, as a little girl, I would run home after school and turn on cartoons. I’ll never forget this cartoon I saw, I think it was Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd. It was a Wild West sort of episode. All of a sudden, this very stereotypical Indian man with a big red nose comes lumbering across the screen. He was wearing a banner that said “Vanishing American.” He walked across the screen, and he disappeared; he faded to black.

I remember being in third grade, and just internalizing that. I never forgot that feeling. What caused me to found Reclaiming Native Truth was as a mother, watching my daughter be bullied because we had given her a traditional Dakota name. It led to her almost taking her life and having a lot of struggles. I felt like enough is enough. So many of us as mothers and fathers and aunties feel this in our professional lives and in our personal lives — the impacts that our lack of representation and misrepresentation have on our people and our children. That was the catalyst for everything that I’m doing right now.

Cara Romero, Bioneers: I have a similar way of stepping into the work, and probably a not-uncommon story of being raised both on the reservation and in an urban setting. When I first stepped out of the reservation setting, there was definitely a culture shock. We have an understanding and a very private way of knowing and relating to each other within our communities. When we step outside of our communities, it’s really shocking how people perceive us, and how very little they know about what it is to be a contemporary North American indigenous person.

I internalized so many of those things as well, Crystal. I went through school often exhausted from trying to explain the truth about where I’m from, which is a lesser-known tribe in California … about how we all look different and how all of our traditions are different.

Then I went on to university, where I was a liberal arts major in Houston studying anthropology. In the university setting, we were taught as bygone, that we were relics of the past.

I realized instantly that through photography, and through media, a picture was worth a thousand words. Maybe, just maybe, I could use this to become a photo documentarian of modern Native Peoples, to use this skill to communicate to people all the intricacies of our cultures, of how alive and how beautiful we are.

Crystal, I think the mascot issue really stands out for me as something that is changing in my lifetime. I have so much respect for everybody who’s been fighting this issue for decades. I remember stepping into tribal college at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and one of the other Native students was wearing an Atlanta Braves hat. I remember it very clearly because Char Teters called him out in class. She was one of the early activists who was fighting for Change the Name. It was a little bit of a scene, but she was explaining to him all the things that we were just talking about, how we really internalized this oppression.

Crystal: You know, this is a movement that’s been going on for decades, particularly with the Washington football team. It’s been led by elders like Suzan Shown Harjo, Amanda Blackhorse, and thousands of other Native Peoples who have been organizing.

One of the biggest targets of all has been the Washington NFL team, which was formerly known as the R-word. The R-word is the N-word. It’s a dictionary-defined racial slur. There are really racist Native sports mascots that show up in all professional sports, but they’re prolific through K-12 schools as well.

It’s not just the logos and the imagery, or the dictionary-defined slur that was the Washington NFL team. It’s the fan behavior. There are chants from rival teams and sports fans, things like “Kill the Indians.” What we found in our research was that this type of behavior promotes discrimination and bias against our people. It’s the red face. And redface is blackface.

Thankfully, this country has moved to a point where it understands that blackface is wrong. We’ve watched people lose their jobs. Yet somehow, redface is okay. The way that the mascot debate has been framed in this country has made it seem like a matter of public opinion. That Washington Post poll said that 500 self-identified Native people think it’s all okay. Or maybe somebody found a Native person to come to the football game, and it all looks good. They act like it’s a matter of opinion. And it’s not—that’s the wrong question, the wrong framing. It’s about harm.

When studies were done with Native children and Native young adults, they found that exposure to not only that imagery but everything around it increases suicidal ideation, depression, and anxiety. This is science speaking. This isn’t just a question of political science. This is actually showing that this causes harm to our children. They found that Native young adults struggle to even see a future for themselves. This imagery depressed their ability to see the future.

So when we look at our skyrocketing rates of suicide and the high rates of depression and the things that our people are struggling with, particularly our children, this becomes a matter of protecting our children from harm. This is what science is telling us. 

What we’ve found through our research is that this level of representation promotes bias and discrimination against our people. It’s important that we smash those toxic stereotypes.

I think on one level, we all knew that. We’ve been talking about that and living it in our lives for so long. But now we actually have data and evidence to show it. Dr. Stephanie Fryberg researched the profound nature of our invisibility and how it has been institutionalized and perpetuated in big systems in this country. Big systems like popular culture. 

That entails everything from sports mascots to TV to film to museums to the role of media and the role of K-12 education. These are perpetuating our erasure and our invisibility, and that is – as Dr. Fryberg says – the modern form of racism against Native Americans today. 

Part of our work at IllumiNative has not only been about advocacy with sports teams and schools and the media. It’s also educating our own people about the harm that these representations have, and that this isn’t a conversation that should be minimized and cast aside for public opinion or political correctness. 

Cara: I think what we’re seeing evolve with all of the contemporary media work is this better future, where we’re able to choose accurate representations of ourselves. And that’s so powerful.

Crystal: Absolutely. The thing that we learned from the Reclaiming Native Truth project is that there’s such immense power in data.

A big part of our work has been taking that research to Hollywood, for example, and meeting with the heads of the biggest studios out there and educating their leadership about the importance of representation. They shouldn’t just check a diversity equity inclusion box. They should be no longer advancing harm by our erasure or by our misrepresentation. 

We were also able to show them through our research that 78% of Americans want to know more about Native Peoples. That 78% figure represents audience demand. That has begun to speak volumes to people within the entertainment industry, and also in media and newsrooms, now that they understand there’s more of an audience for our stories and our issues and what we think.

We have done what feels like hundreds of presentations over the last two years. What we found is that when we educate our allies, I would say probably 85% of the people I talk to are like, “I didn’t know.” Once you walk them through how these big systems work and how they interact within these systems, inadvertently sometimes, most people are like, “I didn’t know,” and “How do I change this?”

It’s been about the power of education and their understanding that they not only need to wake up and own that, but their guilt around it isn’t helpful to us. What’s helpful is for them to partner with us, create platforms, and turn over the mic, so to speak, to Native Peoples. We don’t need non-Native Peoples to come in and save us. We need them to be a partner in dismantling these systems that not only harm Native people but harm all of us. We need them to go within the institutions and systems that they’re operating in, and say, “How are we culpable here? How does Native representation show up and not show up?” And that means everything from governance structures on boards of directors to staff in leadership to how they’re talking to and about Native Peoples. 

Cara: Crystal, what do you feel like has changed during your lifetime?

Crystal: I think about these high points from over the last couple of years: having our first Native US poet laureate, with Joy Harjo being named; Wes Studi being the first Native American male actor to receive an Oscar; the McGirt decision; the Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the Muscogee Creek Nation’s treaty rights, and its reservation; seeing big court victories for NO DAPL; looking at the exposure that was generated at the stand taken at Mt. Rushmore this summer and the way the LandBack movement has emerged from that. It was amazing watching that weekend of the Fourth of July, it was beautiful. There was nothing but a sea of Native faces speaking out on critical issues, from mascots to our treaty rights. It’s been exciting to see how much of that is changing. One of the biggest things is that in 2018 we elected the first two Native American women to Congress.

It’s really about how we are building power. Our representation as contemporary Native Peoples and the way it’s showing up in different facets is huge. Those two women being elected has been transformative. It shows how important that aspect of our representation is. But it’s fairly recent. We’ve been battling invisibility and misrepresentation pretty fiercely, and we still are, but to see the pace of change is really extraordinary.