![]() A tribe isn’t your squad or friends, and deeming it as such erases the battles these actual tribal communities fought to be federally recognized. It’s also used in the context of self-help and team-building. ![]() You’ve likely seen phrases like “bride tribe” and “mama tribe” pop up on mugs, Instagram tiles, and those novelty shirts that the maid of honor gives out at bachelorette parties. But the kinship Native American folks feel to animals is “the result of tens of thousands of years of connections to their environments,” writes the National Museum of the American Indian in a resource guide called “Native American Relationships to Animals: Not Your Spirit Animal,” and unless you take the time to study those complex traditions, you should not be using the term. In fact, the Cherokee, Seminole, and Lakota people (among others) all have spiritual traditions that incorporate a spirit animal or spirit helper, often appear to an individual in a time of need, and represent a desired characteristic, like strength, speed, or shrewdness. “Adapting a concept such as spirits to personalization is like cherry-picking Indigenous beliefs,” he continues. Usually framed as a joke, non-Native American people often claim that anything they love even a little, from wine, to Rihanna, to a chubby cat is their “spirit animal.” This flattening of a Native American spiritual tradition that varies from tribe to tribe “is concerning and often offensive to Native cultures,” Tristan Picotte wrote on the Partnership with Native Americans blog. In effort to do that, here are six terms that non-Indigenous people need to stop appropriating. The next step is to start conversation among your friends who appropriate Indigenous culture and use hurtful language - it shouldn’t always be on Indigenous people to educate ignorant people but on us to spread the word and help each other learn. But don’t take our word for it: Always seek out the words of Native American people when drawing conclusions about these terms, whether it’s in essays, books, documentaries, scholarly works, or even tweets (and we’ve done our best to include the voices of Native American folks here, too). We hope that our fellow non-Indigenous people will take the time to learn the meaning of these words and then make educated decisions about how to use them in daily life. As non-Indigenous writers ourselves, we have noticed that white people in particular have seamlessly integrated these words into daily conversations, sometimes without noticing, acknowledging, or perhaps even caring about the connotations of those words, or how triggering that might be for Native American people to hear this language thrown out without any regard to its context. ![]()
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