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“If the indigenous woman is not the mythical super-Indian presented through contemporary cultural revitalization or her half-sister, a Disneyfied Pocahontas good sex-servant, she is the drunk, the slut, the mother of several children from different fathers, the welfare recipient, the woman who sleeps in an alley.
“So much of our colonial history was about portraying native women as not as good as white women, just a bunch of prostitutes and promiscuous types,” says McKay. “Then there’s that dichotomy. You become recognizable when you perform as the Pocahontas, but the other recognizable form is the indigenous women who’s on 20th Street because of her own making. “All I ever want to be is regular,” McKay says.
She is deeply critical of the churches’ impact on indigenous culture, and speaks of Aboriginal peoples being “colonized” by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. (Today the colonization continues by evangelical Protestants.)
McKay, who was raised as a Catholic, says the churches cemented patriarchy into indigenous culture beginning with the Jesuits who accompanied Samuel de Champlain to New France and left writings recording their disapproval of indigenous women’s social equality and open sexuality.
“The priests were quite intentional in how they were going to Christianize native people, and patriarchy has seeped through the wall of Aboriginal culture because of Christianity, because of colonialism. We cannot just rid ourselves of our colonial history and claim a pure state.”
“What the church teaches,” she says, “is profoundly internalized by a lot of people. I thought I’d rejected it, the male dominance, but I hadn’t realized the extent to which I’d internalized male dominance [and] the shame, the guilt, the sin, the suffering” taught by the church.”
-The Tyee, Not Pocahontas, Not a Super-Indian, Not a Drunk and Not a Slut.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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