OK, I considered saying, "cultural degradation", but in the long run it's a form of cultural genocide.
Today I was looking at the schedule for a local Pow Wow this weekend. To my horror, they have some Nuagers on their workshop schedule! People who, on their website, sell fake Lakota sweats. If I'd known ahead of time, I'd have called ahead to protest. I doubt I'll attend the event, so I won't get the chance to confront them in person.
This horrifies me. I think that when this happens we need to contact the organizers, and if that doesn't get the fraud off the schedule,we need to protest at the event. We've been doing this with Ego Fraud Woman
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1513.325 And I think it needs to go to a more broad-based, grassroots level for other frauds and exploiters as well.
We're also seeing this happen with allegedly Gaelic events. Last year one of our local Highland Games decided to re-market themselves as a generic, "Celtic Festival." Instead of, say, just including things of interest to, and representatives from, the other Celtic Nations, there was now generic stuff like henna tattoo booths, Wiccans and Nuagers, and folk musicians with no connection to any Celtic culture. The Wiccans and Nuagers are already a problem at some Scottish and Irish festivals - they'll show up in the guise of selling relevant books and artwork, then start doing storytelling that has all the history and mythology wrong, selling books with misleading info, and sometimes using the event as an opportunity to hand out flyers for their other projecrs: inaccurate, misleading, and appropriation-based workshops, ceremony-selling or spiritual tourism.
I guess I'd only known about the smaller pow wows, run by legitimate Nations. I knew there were weird, more general gatherings that had appropriated the term, but this is the first time I've seen known Nuagers and ceremony sellers on the bill. I think one of the ways this Nuage group got away with being included is they sent their token brown (but non-NDN) person to front for them. I've seen the Nuagers exploit people as tokens this way. They get someone who can "pass" as NDN - out here usually an Italian or Jewish person, though I've also seen Latino and East Indian people go along with the fraud - to represent them at the event, so the white liberals are scared to question their legitimacy. It sickens me to see people letting themselves be used that way, and actively participating in the fraud. But I'm also very angry at the people running these events who either aren't doing better checks on who they're hiring (I mean, come on, all they had to do was look at the person's website), or who only care that the people bring in some money so they just don't care that they're hiring a fraud.
Argh.
