J6 ONE YEAR LATER, Ep. 5: The Violence of Playing Indian
Dr. Dana Lloyd is an expert on Native American religious traditions and faculty at Villanova University. She speaks to Brad about how the QAnon Shaman's appropriation of Native American symbols extends a long lineage of White people "playing Indian." According to Dr. Lloyd, "playing Indian" is a means of eliminating indigenous peoples by using their symbols, rituals, and traditions while leaving them behind--often through violence and attempted genocide. She draws on her own upbringing in Israel-Palestine to explain how the J6 rioters as a whole saw themselves taking what has always been given to them by God.
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Welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm a faculty at the University of San Francisco.
Our show is hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
And today we're continuing our series, J6 One Year Later, discussing January 6th, the insurrection, and just a view from a year out and what it looks like.
And today I have another great guest, somebody whose work I really appreciated as it comes to the religious dimensions of January 6th, and that is Dr. Dana Lloyd.
So I'll just say, Dr. Lloyd, thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
I'm very excited to be here, Brad.
So Dana is Dr. Lloyd, is an assistant professor of global interdisciplinary studies at Villanova, holds a PhD from Syracuse, has degrees from Tel Aviv University Law School, and is also about to publish a book called Arguing for This Land, Rethinking Indigenous Sacred Sites.
And so today we're here to talk about the article that Professor Lloyd just published at The Uncivil Religion Exhibit, which was done in partnership between the University of Alabama and the Smithsonian Institute.
And the article is titled, QAnon Shaman and Native American Religious Freedom.
And I wanted to just, it's a really, really insightful piece and really one that I hope everyone goes and checks out.
But I want to start by asking you this, the QAnon Shaman Claims that he's practicing shamanism.
He says that he sings and dances and drums and he does certain things as a shaman.
However, the way you put it, and folks, I haven't slowed down here to tell you about the QAnon Shaman, because I'm assuming y'all can imagine that the man who, Jacob Angeli, who's in the paint and wearing the hat and carrying an American flag on a spear.
I've talked about the QAnon Shaman with Susanna Crockford and with Amanda Moore and with Bill Gorski.
So we've talked about the QAnon Shaman on the show.
But in your words, Data, he is doing something that has been done for a long time in American history, and that is playing Indian.
And that includes cultural appropriation of Native American practices and symbols.
And it's incredibly hurtful and damaging.
So what is playing Indian?
And why is it such a violent thing to do by someone like the QAnon shaman Jacob Angeli?
Yeah, that's a great question.
So playing Indian is a term taken from a Religious studies scholar Phil Deloria, who's Lakota, who has a book called Playing Indian, where he looked at instances where white people in the U.S.
have pretended to be Native American, from the Boston Tea Party to contemporary things such as non-Indigenous academics pretending to be Indian, urban outfitters selling t-shirts with a Navajo quote-unquote inspired print, To Sephora selling Starters Witch Kits, to, I guess, white hippies learning how to do a sweat lodge and smudging and things like that, right?
We see it everywhere.
We see it with sports teams and mascots and things like that.
We've all encountered that.
And the argument that Native American Studies scholars make about why This is so bad is that this is a way for white Americans to attach themselves to the land and claim a right to this land.
It seems that it one of the reasons there's two things you talk about in the piece that seem specifically damaging about it.
One is that it's a form of cultural appropriation.
The other is that it follows on what Patrick Wolf calls a logic of elimination.
So could you help us understand both of those?
How is what Jacob Angele is doing a form of cultural appropriation?
I think people hear that word or that phrase a lot these days.
They don't know exactly what it is or what it means.
So how is that going on here?
And then what is this logic of elimination at play when someone is quote unquote playing Indian?
Right, yeah.
So that's a great question, and I think that the two things are actually tightly related, right?
They're not really two different things.
Cultural appropriation is one way in which this, what Patrick Wolfe, Australian historian, calls logical elimination.
Sorry, cultural appropriation is one way in which this logic plays out, right?
So cultural appropriation, again, is what I think what we call cultural appropriation is when people like again fashion designers or just the men on the street right uses Native American culture or any other culture right as if it's their own without giving Credit without paying.
So in the Indigenous context and we can stay with the fashion design example and say I could buy a $59 t-shirt from Urban Outfitters that looks like it's that reminds you when you see me wearing it right of Navajo people or generic Indian culture or something like that.
I could on the other hand go to Indigenous artists and fashion designers and buy I guess a question that I always ask my students and I don't have a good answer for it.
this fashion originate, the representation we can imagine would be more respectful and more accurate.
I guess a question that I always ask my students, and I don't have a good answer for it.
If you see me walking in the street wearing indigenous style clothes, you don't know where Like maybe I paid $300 to a Cherokee artist who did something very respectful and accurate.
I don't know if to you it would look different from anything I would, any kind of rip-off, right?
So I can't tell you if it's only the theft that's the bad thing that's happening or also just the general cultural phenomenon of white people trying to associate themselves with Native cultures, right?
So these are maybe two levels of problematic aspects of cultural appropriation, right?
But the idea of attaching yourself as a non-Indigenous person to Indigenous culture that goes back to Patrick Morphin's logic of elimination is that what it tells you is that Native people are disposable, their cultures are disposable, their lands are disposable, I am here to appropriate, to steal, and to dispossess, right?
And I don't need them to stay around because I can replace them.
The elimination has different aspects to it.
There is the genocide, right, and the killing.
There is the removal and things like the Trail of Tears.
But there's also the things that seem perhaps benign or much less harmful.
But because, like cultural appropriation, right?
But because they take part in this big picture, structural, systemic oppression and dispossession of Native peoples, we can't ignore them and we can't think of them as just playful, benign.
And perhaps for people like Angeli may say, I actually admire the culture and I want to associate myself with it, right?
So they may tell you that it's positive what you're doing.
But if we see the big picture, we can't ignore the harm that it does.
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