Native Appropriations

In this speech done by Adrienne Keene, she begins to talk a lot about her blog and the four C’s which are critical lens, contemporary issues and culture, community, and counter narratives. It involves a lot of the stereotypes that are seen in today’s society that are very much wrong. These involve things such as the Halloween costumes (Sexy Native American Indian) and more. These stereotypes are what drove Keene to start blogging five years ago. Throughout this speech, Keene talks a lot about Urban Outfitters and how they began making clothes that had a lot of tribal print on them. She was completely disgusted with what she had been seeing. These clothes also consisted of fake moccasins and feather earrings. Keene began getting more and more pictures of the “Indian style” clothing that Urban Outfitters was coming out with and began making her first blog and writing about why and how these articles of clothing were hurtful. Once she began writing more and more on this blog, around the fifth year of writing, she began to change the name to Representations Matter. While continuing to write on her blog, Keene opened up to a Facebook page and  Twitter page which has received a lot of positive reviews and backup on her topic of conversation. Once a lot of brands and companies started realizing the hurt they were doing, they began to pull certain advertisements and pieces of clothing. Keene wants people to be able to see things that they might not have seen before, such as the clothing stereotype. Overall, the main topic of this speech was to make the point of how hurtful this theme of clothing is and how Keene wanted brands such as Urban Outfitters, J. Crew, Victorias Secret to understand how although it might be a look that they think is cute, it is very hurtful to the Native American people who wear these as apart of their culture.