Professor Dean's views were accurately captured in the OP's linked article, although the headline ("reeks") was a bit sensationalist. In
her book, she says: "if my paddle represents my desire, as a non-indigenous Canadian, to be vitally and historically and spiritually connected to place, indigenous to Canada, then this book represents both the loss of that dream for me and my attempt to disrupt, trouble, and denaturalize that dream for other non-indigenous Canadians."
Surely Professor Dean is correct about certain things: Virtually all Canadian wilderness canoeists today are white, usually male and well educated -- and old, as the CTN poll has recently proved.
I'd expand Professor Dean's observation even further for the U.S., where we have a history of oppressing not only Indians but blacks. In all my canoe travels around America over many decades, I have encountered only a tiny handful of black canoeists and kayakers and none that I could recognize as Indian. In the South I will see blacks occasionally in fishing boats, but not canoes or kayaks.
So, it's clear to me as a historical fact that white North Americans, ancestral to Europe, adopted canoes and kayaks from racial groups indigenous to the areas that the white Europeans invaded and conquered. Whether anyone should feel guilty today about these historical events is another matter.
Before I feel too much guilt about "appropriating" things from "native" or "indigenous" peoples, I wonder what these terms mean on a more global and longer historical scale. It's my observation from reading history, and simply observing our current planet, that one tribe or people have always been conquering, subjugating and engaging in attempted genocides of other tribes and peoples. No one knows how many migrations originally populated North America from Asia or, in pre-history, what "indigenous" migrants slaughtered other "native" migrants. We do know that various Indian tribes and nations warred on and slaughtered each other from Alaska to South America just in the the post-Columbus era of history, often taking the survivors as slaves.
The racial and religious tribal conquests, re-conquests and slaughters go on today in the Middle East and parts of Africa and Asia, and so does slavery.
So, I save most of my guilt for the species-genocide that my homo sapien ancestors committed against the Neanderthals throughout Europe. We brainy white b*st*rds killed them all.
Well . . . not quite all. Some Neanderthals still survive under different names:
Politicians and college professors.
Must view during this election season!
