Culture's Price Tag - Peddling Native Culture in Drew Hayden Taylor's The Berlin Blues

Activity: Talk or presentationConference PresentationsResearch

Maryann Henck - Speaker

In the tourism industry, the image of Indigenous peoples has been romanticized, exoticized, and commodified for the tourist gaze of its primary consumers – white North Americans and Europeans. Popular culture icons and media representations of Indigenous peoples facilitate the dissemination as well as perpetuation of positive and negative stereotypes in our media-saturated, post-modern society. “Indianthusiasm,” a term coined by Hartmut Lutz, explains the Germans’ positive stereotyping of and unrivalled fascination with all things Native. Additionally, Karl May’s popular novels have served to increase the Germans’ interest in Native culture. In The Berlin Blues, Canadian/Anishnawbe playwright Drew Hayden Taylor capitalizes on this very “Indianthusiasm” to provide thought-provoking insights about how Native culture meets pop culture on a sleepy reserve in Canada.My proposal will focus on literary representations of intercultural interactions between “hosts” and “guests” as well as on the commodification of cultural heritage (e.g. analysis of artifacts and performance). Can you put a price tag on culture? This very question is tried and tested in Taylor’s zany comedy with serious overtones. Initially, he ridicules the overly industrious endeavors of two extremely efficient German developers who descend upon a First Nations reserve in fictive Otter Lake to present their not so modest proposal for a Native theme park – “Ojibwaytastic” OjibwayWorld. However, it is not only the Germans who have no chance of escaping Taylor’s scrutiny and cleverly couched criticism – the Natives of Otter Lake are fair game as well. This comedy provides vivid examples that satirize how Native culture gets peddled (e.g. casinos, esoteric spiritualism) and offers an ideal springboard for lively discussions about how the Indigenous population could potentially reconcile their traditions and values with the stereotypical expectations of the dominant culture. Thus, conflicting views about tourism as a form of cultural imperialism as well as a trigger for social change and cultural revival will be addressed.
13.04.2012

Event

33rd American Indian Workshop - AIW 2012 : "Presentation and Representation" Revisited: Places, Media, Disciplines

12.04.1215.04.12

Zürich, Switzerland

Event: Workshop