Smileys are a good way to start...
My history with bumping into misappropriation and discrimination and internalized racism is life-long and finally, at this stage in my life, I just thought I'd start looking for maybe some kind of watch group and contribute my knowledge and stories to inform people who may be vulnerable to exploitation, and to hopefully straighten out some sideways skins out there, in the process. I have helped many victims of "plastic shamans" recover their dignity after their betrayal by so-called spiritual leaders and one thing I know is, the word of mouth in Indian Country is vicious. These guys and women, too, are always running, always having to run, usually to Whites whom they can sucker into sheltering them, because no law is going to protect them on the rez. So, I do workshops about what to do if you're being coaxed into one of these groups, if you're recovering from abuse, or if you're a parent whose child has been exploited by one of these people. I can share all that's been learned from these workshops over the last ten years, if anyone wants the info. I can steer the genuinely interested to proper resources to help them learn about us, and themselves, too, and far away from BS and malicious manipulation: plain old witchery.
I used to work as a cultural consultant for businesses and teach their managers things like cross-cultural communication and aspects of leadership from an indigenous perspective. (I'm Cree, btw). I even ran a council model as an experimental design for my master's thesis. It was a huge success. Were participants charged? No. Do master's students get paid to do research? No. Why is it okay to share what you know from your culture in a setting like this, and not okay to create a lodge and sell passes to sundances and vision quests, moon lodges and drum circles and so on? Because a workshop presenter such as myself is informing participants as to what they should know about natives and about themselves, not brainwashing them into believing that they are somehow sacred, appointed spiritual gurus with authority to organize and supervise historical ceremonies outside of sanctions, you know, like rogue priests or cultists do. So, my main perspective is, there is a huge difference between education and exploitation and what people need to know is what that difference is. They also need to know what to do if this should happen to them or their loved ones. There is nothing worse than the look in a father's eyes when his daughter is recovered from under the blankets of one of these plastic ex-human beings. His entire role as protector and provider has been violated more deeply than even the daughter's person has been, in some cases. How's a rattle and a bag of powder going to fix that?
To date, I've seen a dozen families and the lives of almost thirty women and over a dozen children completely destroyed by charlatains like this. As I completed my degree work and was able to function in the fields of linguistics and communications, training field researchers and designing research projects, I had to sit and use linguistic theories to try to help several victims of this kind of exploitation relive the trauma and try to put themselves back together again, Western psychology had no resources for this. They did things like meditation (borrowed from some other culture) and dispense pills, guaranteeing a cycle of addiction, psychotic episodes, and loss of dignity. You know, the Anglo psychologists would refer these Anglo victims over to "one of us" to "see what we could do" and just washed their hands. They didn't even care about who had what license. That's bizarre.
So, let me know how I can contribute. I'm open to conversations, I even do online live broadcasts and would love an open discussion on air. I can exchange information and just support this initiative. This is the Idle No More season. A lot of us are getting up off our flat butts to take action in lots of different ways. I am going to post a list of fallacies, myths, and other misinformation that needs to be dispelled at last, and hopefully have some words of advice from my own experiences, too. (Oh, I'm a great cook and have Coeliac's, so I can prepare a lot of safe dishes, traditional and non-traditional, too - i.e., recipe exchange!)
