Tag: #culturalappropriation

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Can Facebook Teach the World to Sing?

Coke comes to Monument Valley. Photo by Worldmark Films via Twitter

In 1971, Coca Cola aired its famous ad that featured a gathering of young folks from all corners of the earth, each with a Coke in hand, all singing blissfully on a hilltop outside of Rome. “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony,” sang the bright-eyed young citizens of the world. “I’d like to give the world a Coke to keep it company.” The award-winning spot was a moment of nirvana in the advertising age and became the iconic ending of the TV series Mad Men. (4/1/20 Author’s Note: The ad was actually the brainchild of Harvey Gabor, then art director at McCann-Erickson. Mr. Gabor is nothing at all like the Matthew Weiner’s bad boys of Sterling Cooper. Big thank you to Miriam Danar and the illustrious and genteel Mr. Gabor their comments on this piece!)

In 2018, at the age of 64, I had a moment of nirvana while meandering on horseback in Monument Valley at sunset. And I did what so many do these days when overcome with awe. I whipped my iPhone out of my jacket pocket and, steadying the phone with one hand while gripping the reins with the other, I tried to capture the moment to store in the cloud for posterity.

Now, in 2020, I am retired from my day job and back at work on the blog that I started after that 2018 trip to the Southwest. Part reminiscence, part current observations, the blog is really my reconnection to the act of writing for pleasure instead of for a paycheck in the corporate world. Monument Valley is just about as far from cubicle life as anyone could imagine, which is why it serves so well as a muse.

A shot I took from atop a horse in Monument Valley, 2018

Because writing for myself just doesn’t get my juices going, in resurrecting the blog after retirement, I took the step of launching it into the social media reality show universe. I tossed a few bucks over to Facebook’s ad managers to spread the news via a Facebook page. That was a week ago.

The response (i.e., the accumulating likes and shares and comments) has been uplifting, eye opening and mystifying.

A tenuous handshake reached on topic of cultural appropriation. Photo courtesy of JenKVieira.com

Facebook keeps congratulating me about how many “likes” I have, and my blog itself, which sat dormant for so long, is making the rounds from Queens to Hong Kong and other places I couldn’t have fathomed. The blog has pleased some, amused some, confused some, and enraged some. Comments on one post hurled the cultural appropriation debate forcefully into my lap, initiating an offline exchange that ended with a handshake. It was a tenuous handshake between a boomer and a millennial, but a handshake nonetheless.

There have been a couple of ugly comments (one guy labeled me an “entitled little rich girl”), but, hey, if a grey-haired retiree can’t stand the social media heat, then there’s a button called “delete.” I draw the line at racism, but otherwise, I was raised by a father who’d say “everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.” Negative comments are part of the territory like rattlesnakes in the desert. And Facebook is taking its own heat these days for spreading fake news.

But it’s the gathering of likes on my page that floors me.

Motorcycle at Monument Valley. Photo by Steve Ohlsen

The likes represent all races, many religions, and all sides of the political divide. They represent environmentalists, resistors, 2nd Amendment crusaders, anti-Trumpers, pro-Trumpers, Navajos, African Americans, Mexicans, New Mexicans, Texans, Bostonians, New Yorkers, Alabamans, Californians, Georgians, Muslims, Hindus, Baptists, Catholics, Jews, artists, bikers, preachers, professors, knitters, rodeo riders, doormen . . . .

Though featuring reminiscences of the Southwest, and especially Navajoland, my page and my blog have been “liked” by a couple folks whose Facebook pages are all in Arabic. I have a like from someone whose page is in Armenian.

What is it? What are the Facebook algorithms that spread the word to such a diverse community? What is the impulse to hit “like” of the unknown and untried? I hope some of my “likers” will tell me, because the answer may be an ingredient in a secret sauce yet to be conjured to smooth our divisions.

Pictures on the rocks: Ancient social media in Canyon de Chelly

The likes may just be summoned by my original blog site cover image of Monument Valley, harkening back to the days when rocks told stories, when petroglyphs were the social media of the ancient ones.

Or maybe it’s because one of my blogs is about basketball, published after Kobe Bryant went down in the helicopter. Maybe the theme of cultural appropriation struck a chord amidst the cacophony surrounding the bestselling novel American Dirt. Or maybe it’s a shot of Bandelier National Monument I published that speaks of ancient days when life was all about survival and not much else.

Or maybe it’s simply what I thought when I looked out at Monument Valley from the saddle . . . that this is all a dream.

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Cultural Appropriation Police Report, 1975

A white New Mexico State Trooper teaching Indian Painting inspired the New Yorker in me

In 1975, when I taught on the Navajo rez outside of Gallup, the state of New Mexico didn’t fund kindergarten, let alone art education. If I wanted my kids to paint, weave, sculpt, then it was up to me to add art to the list of subjects I was hired to teach in my classroom. It is worth noting without too much emphasis that I landed my teaching job on the rez after graduating from Vassar, where I never took a fine art class and would have been an idiot to think I belonged in the college’s creative arts talent pool.

Though I wasn’t an anthropology major (and Native Studies didn’t exist back then) I knew that art and craft loomed large in Navajo culture. So not wanting to be a total fraud, I signed up for a night class called “Indian Painting” at the University of New Mexico Gallup Branch.

It turned out I was one of the few female students in the class as well as one of the youngest. I was not the only white person, however. There was one other, that being our instructor, whose name I remember to this day. I will refer to him by his initials, LS, so as not to disturb his ghost.

1975 UNM Gallup Art Instructor Seal of Approval

LS was a New Mexico state trooper. He looked like he could be an extra in a Hollywood film about Texas Rangers. But LS was an ARTIST. You could tell because he dressed all in black—black jeans, black shirt, black cowboy boots. And he had a shiny Navajo silver buckle on his black belt, which I guess advertised his cred for teaching art to a class of mostly Navajos and Zunis. His stride and swagger, though, spoke of his true profession.

LS had a formula he wanted all of his students to copy. His formula was simple: Paint four images of Pueblo pots, one in each corner of your canvas. And in the middle of the space, paint an “Indian” sun symbol (e.g., the emblem of the State of New Mexico). Toss in some corn and lightning symbols in the rest of the space, and voila: surefire Indian painting success! LS showed us his many Indian paintings and boasted that he made up to $75 a piece. If he could do it, we could too!!

LS Indian Painting Element #1: Pueblo Pot
LS Indian Painting Element #2: Sun Symbol
LS Indian Painting Element #3: Corn or other symbols

I was seated at a worktable (no easels needed apply) with three males, one of whom was my age. The other two seemed to be in their late thirties or early forties.

As I said, I was a young graduate of Vassar College, and though I was the lone female and lone white at the table, I said to my tablemates: “Are you going to put up with this??” Everyone laughed, and we made a communal decision: No, we weren’t. We decided to start a new art movement, a Navajo take on Dada (my age mate at the table, who would eventually become a renowned non-traditional silversmith, knew all about Dada). We called it DOODA (pronounced doh’dah’), which is Navajo for NO. An older tablemate had a buddy at the table in front of us and roped him into our DOODA movement.

DOODA used in modern Navajo resistance: This graphic says “No Uranium”

We churned out paintings that made LS speechless, shaking his head in disappointment. When he strutted around giving tours of the assembly line he called “Indian painting,” LS brusquely guided his guests past our tables without a pause.

My tablemates and I painted masterpieces of anything we wanted. Images of Navajo Yei figures as electrical towers, of horses that flew into the heavens, of sheep lying shot and dead in the desert said DOODA to our State Trooper art instructor. While we painted, we discussed topics of the day, circa 1975: Lynette Squeaky Fromme, Sarah Jane Moore (female would-be assassins of Gerald Ford). We told jokes, named favorite comedians (one tablemate said he prayed that George Burns would live to at least his 100th birthday).

My final art project as a 22 year old Jewish transplant from the East Coast? Well, this was 1975, and New York City was on the brink of default, which is one reason why I came to the rez in the first place. New York City laid off 2000 teachers when I graduated from college, and I had decided that if I couldn’t teach in New York, I didn’t want to teach in any city at all.

New York City Mayor Abe Beame

So as an adios to LS, I painted “Grandfather Gods Take Manhattan,” a New York cityscape lit by a Navajo moon and shrouded in clouds of doom, with Navajo Grandfather Gods (Yeibicheii) flying overhead with their healing bundles to the rescue (see above). I’d also cut out and attached a photo of New York Mayor Abe Beame, but the mayor somehow disappeared from the work during my many moves years hence.

LS gave my rudimentary work a B+, with no comments.