Cultural Appropriation or Storytelling?

How do we learn about other cultures? Do we only take in what we have personally seen and experienced? Do we read about them, learn the language, study the art and artifacts, listen critically to their music, or try to create within another culture entirely? This is probably the prickliest topic there is for anyone currently involved in the arts. Having written a book that took my main character into a culture that she only learned in her thirties was largely hers, the prospect of traveling this cultural journey with her seemed highly appealing. It took over a year of research before the book even began, and then it almost wrote itself. At the time, my heroine’s path presented itself as self-illuminating, but now that the first draft of the manuscript is completed the question of cultural appropriation, always looming in the distance, is right in my face.

What now? Does a story that teaches those who might never learn about an unexplored story or culture go into the waste bin because someone other than a member of that culture tells it? If that’s the case, should we toss “Romeo and Juliet,” “Julius Caesar,” and many other plays by William Shakespeare into the can because, after all, Shakespeare wasn’t Italian? Does Puccini owe an apology to the Japanese people for writing “Madame Butterfly,” or was he making a statement about the British colonialism and its cavalier treatment of other races in an opera that rips our hearts to shreds?

Recently my husband and I read a remarkably beautiful novel by William Kent Kreuger, “This Tender Land.” It tells the story of four youngsters who escape from an Indian Boarding School in Minnesota during the 1930’s. One boy is full-blooded Indian; a very young girl is part Native; and two boys, supposedly brothers, are white. Learning about the horrors and the tragedies of what happened to Indigenous children while reading something so thoughtfully crafted brings readers from any and all races into an understanding of a truth that was long suppressed. Should we not hear this story because the writer is not a Native American and therefore cannot know personally how it feels to be cruelly treated and undervalued? Does this make the book unworthy of publication? My original impression has been to think not. Isn’t whatever shines light on hidden truths, no matter who tells the story, of enormous value and beyond being measured by the credentials of the storyteller?

However, there is great weight to the other side of the argument. The more one reads the actual historical records of the way our continent’s First Nations endured being murdered, massacred, deceived, and robbed of their lands and everything they held sacred, the more horrified one becomes. A truly splendid, well-researched and documented book, “All The Real Indians Died Off” And 20 Other Myths About Native Americans by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Dina Gilio-Whitaker, approaches this very issue as Myth 14: “Native Culture Belongs To All Americans.” After having barely survived a physical genocide, having their children taken away and sent to boarding schools for generations, after having their lands and rights stripped away, after having whole nations made extinct, with only shreds of their various cultures left to them, must this tiny remainder of what was originally an enormous population of Indigenous peoples have even that taken away and used by others? Why should the descendants of the very people who took everything from them benefit from their stories, and music, and art as well?

The realization of this final and ultimate theft of culture stopped me cold. I had been thinking that the book I’d written honored Native culture, while also illuminating some painful historical truths, but the deeper question has been lurking there all along: who really benefits from this book? Is the information it contains, although thought-provoking and educational in one sense, reason enough to publish a novel whose story and characterizations are based on cultures that are still fighting for respect and for their very survival today, right now, this very minute?

That question has finally, at least for me, come to the fore, and it has been enough to make me put the manuscript aside indefinitely. Don’t get me wrong. I love this book. I love this story and my characters, and on one hand it might have proven itself to be inspiring to generations of young women. But it might also have truly offended and hurt so many others, people who have been hurt enough. Such a possibility by far outweighs any considerations in the pro-publication column. And so, “Stiqayu: Ghost Wolf” will probably never be released or published. It was fun to write, helped to educate me about so many Native issues, forced me to do years of research and reading that I might never otherwise have pursued, inspired me to learn quite a lot of the beautiful Lushootseed language, and sensitized me to cultural appropriation in a way that very little else could have.

Currently, I’m in the midst of writing the fourth book in the Blanchard House Series, “His Last Eight Bars.” It’s about all the things I know intimately: the lives of classical musicians, psychology, food and wine, love, friendship, the delights of sharing our lives with beloved animal companions, and also the occasionally dark side of human nature. There’s a richness to the everyday lives and inner experiences we keep to ourselves, and sometimes find ourselves sharing with friends and lovers. There’s a lot to be said for that, after all, isn’t there?