Trying to raise kind, socially conscious and respectful kids in this world is kind of terrifying. There’s so much to get wrong. This week, for instance, it looked like me tackling a little subject I like to call “Cultural Appropriation and Racism: Less Fun Than You Think!”

*Sigh*

When you live with 6 years olds the calendar year is organized around the following:

Birthdays

Halloween

Christmas

And yes, in my house that’s the order of importance. Which is to say, Halloween is RIGHT up there. And because we’re now into the first week of October, costume talk has begun in earnest. Hence the following exchange with my daughter as she looked through last year’s kindergarten year book:

Her: Hey, mama look! That girl is dressed like an Indian!

Me: Yeah… you know what honey? It’s not cool to dress up like an Indian.

Her: But why?

SMASH CUT TO: my pained face as I run the spirals of my brain for some way to explain it

Making my answer slightly more sensitive is the fact that my children are status Indians – and they know it. They’ve been to a Sundance, many Pow-Wows and know a few words of their father’s first language of Cree among other things. They don’t, however, carry the public burden of looking like the prototypical “Indian.” Which is to say, they present as a couple of very white kids.

What this means in practice is that they’ll receive whatever advantage their status affords them (mainly subsidized health and dental care) but suffer none of the insult. That is, they won’t experience the normalized, every day cruelty of racism that Aboriginal people in this country live with as a matter of course.

Our dominant society neither respects nor appreciates traditional wardrobe or practices when they’re connected to living culture or history. When it’s a costume, on the other hand – when someone wants to play in it by wearing pow wow regalia and war paint – it’s awesome. And hilarious! Which is to say nothing of the ubiquitous “Pocahottie” or “Chief” costumes which are demeaning (that’s to say, racist) in the extreme.

No one wants to hear about the pain or injustice of life lived as a visible minority in this country. To the contrary, people are regularly annoyed by the discussion. Yet these same people see no conflict in their desire to celebrate and commercialize the “exotic” traditions of minorities for their entertainment value.

I hope it’s self-evident this isn’t an issue specific to Native Americans either, but is true across cultures. It’s not cool to dress as an African, a Mexican or a Chinese person either. To do so is to further marginalize and trivialize all of them.

The reality is that it’s a lot more fun for a white person to play dress up as a Native/African/Mexican/Chinese person than it is for people to actually live the truth of these lives. Dressing “as if” does nothing to foster understanding or empathy either. If anything it only entrenches existing stereotypes and judgement - because no one puts on a costume to experience oppression and injustice.

You can’t make the argument that wearing culture as a costume is about honour or respect either. As Cadmona Hall says, “A major distinction lies in how much power and privilege we assign to the people we’re dressing as.”

Generally? Cultural appropriation is how members of a dominant group exploit the culture of those less advantaged, typically ,with little appreciation or understanding of the latter’s history, experience or traditions. It’s the difference between dressing up as Lady Gaga, Sydney Crosby or Tupac Shakur who you admire for their talent and abilities and dressing up as an anonymous Chinese rice-paddy worker or African slave where you paint your face, appropriate their culture and belly laugh with your buddies.

It turns out that having a frank conversation about racism with my kids was almost as awkward as having a frank conversation with them about sex. It was somehow embarrassing in the same way I blushed a little the first time I said the word “vagina” out loud to them. But giving your kids the real names for things, whether it’s body parts or social ways of being, is to give them both power and agency. Which is why, for the greater good, I got over myself and waded right into it.

“In Canada, brown-skinned kids don’t get treated the same as white-skinned kids. They get treated badly just because their skin is a different colour. Some white people think they know more and better because their skin is white – and we call this racism.”

“But that’s totally not fair! Because we’re all the same under our skin!”

The kids are seriously alright. We adults, however, have a problem or 300. One of our big jobs in the world is to pass on as few of them as possible to our children.

My hope is that teaching them some history, including the shameful bits, will build empathy and position them to help protect society generally from further cultural and racial insult.

I want them to understand, for example, that people with power, like those of us who are white (or even those of us who just look the part), have regularly taken what we wanted from other people, culture included. This always occurred without asking (a big no-no when you’re 6 that adults repeatedly forget) and often with no consideration for the feelings of those we take from. As the kids learned on Orange Shirt Day, in the case of Aboriginal people in Canada, this meant the taking of actual children. And they get it: “That’s so sad and scary. I would never want that to happen, ever.”

Exactly the point.

An “Indian” costume - or Arab or Japanese or anything else, frankly - is neither homage nor “costume.” It’s someone’s history. Someone’s tradition. Someone’s culture. It comes with a story we can’t fully know unless we’ve been inside it - which is to say, it’s someone’s life. And no one gets free candy for that.