Beyond Tradition: Today's Native Youth Organizing

"9 out of 10 people think that as a Native American woman, I'm supposed to look like either that Land-O-Lakes butter girl, or Disney's Pocahontas," says Charlotte Chinana, a 22-year-old, New Mexico-based Native youth activist of Dineh and Jemez Pueblo blood.

Understandably, these stereotypes don't sit well with many of today's Native youth. Images in the mass media (and mainstream culture as a whole) are just one of the challenges Native youth face however. Factor in high rates of poverty, joblessness, alcoholism, and diabetes, and one gets a sense of what's fueling the new brand of youth organizing going on in Native communities.

By 2000, less than 20% of Native Americans still lived on reservations. Though the shift to more urban and suburban areas has introduced its own challenges, it has also opened up a whole new realm of possibilities to Native youth. They are embracing urban-based cultures more than ever, and though this has introduced a kind of gap between today's Native youth and their more-traditional elders, it has not necessarily led them away from their heritage. If anything, despite identifying with a number of non-traditional cultures, today's Native youth are more aware of how important it is that they preserve and maintain personal connections with their traditional culture.

"Oh great, what are the Indians doing now?"

Seeing only the degradation of their culture reflected in the mass media has a profound impact on Native youth. But there are a growing number of them rejecting those images, and taking action to prove them wrong.

When Native youth do show up in the media, their activism is often portrayed as hostile and dangerous.

		"I don't think the indigenous youth have really seen media that reflect themselves. They're still searching for an identity."

"Here in Canada, when we're portrayed in the media it's just as a pain in the ass. Like, 'Oh great, what are the Indians doing now?' Whether we're fighting for our natural watersheds, or to stop the logging and mining of our mountains," says Simon Reece, a staff writer for "Redwire," a Vancouver, British Columbia-based magazine for Native youth. "It's different from down in the States, because I don't think down in the States they're portrayed at all in the mass media, ya know? Or when they are, it's the cheesy guy with braids, or the whole casino thing. But you know, whether they're portraying us as the typical Hollywood Indian, or the militant Indian, we're all being portrayed as uncultured scum. I don't think the indigenous youth have really seen media that reflect themselves. They're still trying to search for an identity."

Empowered Native young people have been reclaiming the right to define themselves in the public eye. For instance, most Navajo no longer call themselves such (except for the benefit of non-Natives), instead using the traditional term Dineh, which literally translates to "the people." Other tribes are shedding the names given them by European colonists as well: Chippewa people are more likely to call themselves Annishinaabeg. Sioux prefer Lakota/Oglala, Dakota, or Nakota. At schools where "Indians" are still used as mascots, there are student groups organized to change that. According to a resolution passed earlier this year by the Student Senate of Minnesota State University, Mankato, Indian mascots foster "a discriminatory environment which promotes racist stereotypes and dehumanizes and disrespects Native peoples and cultures." And there are precedents for success: an Indian mascot was challenged, and deposed, by students at Stanford University in 1972.

Even the word "Indian" is being appropriated and redefined. In his famous speech given in July 1980 at the Black Hills International Survival Gathering in the Black Hills of South Dakota, Russell Means defends the use of the term, which is European in origin. He says there is "some confusion about the word Indian, a mistaken belief that it refers somehow to the country India. When Columbus washed up on the beach in the Caribbean, he was not looking for a country called India. Europeans were calling that country Hindustan in 1492. Look it up on the old maps. Columbus called the tribal people he met "Indio," from the Italian in dio, meaning "in God.""