The article finishes by insisting that companies must listen to American Indian tribes, although by that they likely mean to listen to themselves and specific Native Americans who think like them.
Washington Post published an article on Wednesday calling for the Jeep Cherokee to be renamed due to its cultural appropriation of the name of the Cherokee Indian nation.
The call comes shortly after the CEO of Stellantis, the company which owns Chrysler, announced his openness to a name change.
"When Jeep revived the then-dormant Cherokee brand back in 2014, it never even bothered to contact the Cherokee Nation — and its first response to the request to drop the Cherokee name was to praise itself for choosing names that 'celebrate Native American people for their nobility, prowess, and pride,'" say the authors, Angela R. Riley, Sonia K. Katyal and Rachel Lim.
The authors went on to note that Jeep is far from alone in profiting using the name of Indian tribes, listing off a variety of other brands which do so. The authors complain that these brands largely did not do so without receiving approval from tribal nations or offering them money for their use.
The concept of cultural appropriation, in this sense, acts as a form of intellectual property, except on behalf of an entire group, a ridiculous concept given the human proclivity for cultural exchange.
"By removing tribal names from their histories, lands, contexts and cultures, they obscure contemporary Native American nations," the article states "They also sanitize complex histories of racial and colonial harm." It is unclear how brand names obscure national identity or sanitize the historical mistreatment of Native Americans. According to the authors, a single brand name can "overpower the voices of tribes and people themselves," although they do not provide any clear evidence of this.
Of course, you also cannot cover every aspect of a name in a single brand. A car, pretty much by nature, cannot take land itself into its context. After all, land is static and cars are mobile, but you can cover other, less material aspects of a culture, such as the reputation the Cherokee people have for toughness and fortitude.
These are some of the traits which Jeep invokes with the name Cherokee, and unfortunately for the authors of this study, car ownership in general is much more reflective of the values associated with responsibility, among them being toughness and fortitude, than with victimhood that they would like to see overshadow the perception of the Indian tribes.
The authors use Eskimo Pie by Dreyer's as another example of this, arguing that "[this] happy-go-lucky imagery has circulated more broadly than knowledge of Alaska’s complex colonial history, ignoring the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples of Alaska." While the term "Eskimo" may be considered offensive these days, it is hardly racist to be depicting Indigenous people as happy. One could make this argument for basically any group of people, that depicting anyone as happy in branding ignores a long history of war, a human universal.
The article finishes by insisting that companies must listen to American Indian tribes, although by that they likely mean to listen to themselves and specific Native Americans who think like them. Rather than citing polling data, as even Washington Post had to admit that 90 percent of Native Americans don't care about racially charged names like Redskins let alone a name as innocuous as Cherokee, the authors cite a boy holding a poster from 1996 which reads "I am not a mascot."
Perhaps the Irish will be objecting to the Celtics next.
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