S/O Eskimo Costume

Fox

Mon, Feb 08 2016, 2:13 pm

There is no way to successfully navigate this problem. Dress your children as animals or foodstuffs.

For starters, members of the groups you mention have wildly different opinions about costumes and cultural appropriation.

Go to a powwow and you'll find dozens of Native American vendors who will be thrilled to educate you on the history and meaning of their dress as well as sell you various components. They may even force you to learn a dance or two. They believe that non-Native kids who have met Native Americans and have been exposed to Native culture even in a cursory way will be less likely to make racist jokes or ridicule Native concerns.

Contact a representative from a Native American rights group, and you'll be told that Native American costumes are a benign-looking tool used to denigrate the dignity of Native peoples.

Get these people together, and you may have a brawl.

So usually people say, "Well, avoid costumes based on the traditional dress of any group that has suffered oppression." But that's kind of vague. Almost every group has suffered from oppression at one time or another.

Heck, using that argument, you'd better not wear a tartan plaid. First of all, what right do you have to wear, say, the Davidson tartan unless you are a member of good-standing in Clan Davidson? And virtually every Protestant pink-skinned American can trace at least one ancestor to the Highland Clearances -- a particularly brutal oppression.

So then we're left with, "Don't dress up like people who have been oppressed recently enough that anybody still cares." Hardly the moral high ground.

It's sad, really. One of my favorite experiences as a child was dressing up in traditional costumes of various places, people, and times. You can tell I'm really, really old because it was common back in those days for foreign students at US universities to bring native dress "costumes" from their home countries for the children of their favorite professors. It was thus that I acquired a gorgeous abayah and a cool purple shalwar kameez. My mom received a sari, but she ended up making a tablecloth out of it.

I'm still obsessed by all things Japanese as a result of a beautiful kimono I was given as a kid. I read everything I could about Japan and fantasized about living in a house with shoji screens. Yeah, yeah -- I know. Real 21st century Japanese people live in teensy apartments. Don't ruin my fantasies! My kids long ago made it clear that they'd prefer sandwiches to my feeble attempts at bento boxes.

Dogs, cats, cows, ketchup, mustard, hot dogs, game pieces . . . these are your best bets.