Students, teachers use Halloween to open cultural appropriation dialogue

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Armed with the Twitter hashtags #NotACostume and #CulturalAppropriation, some students at Simon Fraser University are looking to use this coming Halloween as a teachable moment.

A student-led event planned for Tuesday afternoon at the Global Student Centre aims to start a dialogue about how costumes can cause offense and reduce cultures to harmful stereotypes.

It’s a subject SFU archaeologist George Nicholas has studied extensively as the former director of the school’s Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage project (IPinCH).

In an article published this month in Sapiens magazine, Nicholas defines cultural appropriation as “using some aspect of someone else’s heritage without permission or recompense in inappropriate, harmful, or unwelcome ways.”

Many commercially-available costumes depicting Native American princesses, gaishas, sheiks, or hula dancers easily fit that description.

Nicholas admits however that the creativity which defines the holiday can make it difficult to define what is cultural, let alone offensive.

“Halloween is unique in the sense that it is ultimately a kind of cultural anarchy, in that anything goes,” he says. “A good place to start is simply asking the question, ‘might this costume cause offense?'”

Nicholas argues that considering why someone might be offended by a costume opens the door to understanding a wider problem.

“The bigger issue is not Halloween, it’s the fact that cultural appropriation is so rampant in western society, and is, in a sense, a multi-million dollar industry,” he says.

An example cited is the replica totem poles found in nearly every souvenir shop in the Pacific Northwest, which take an important cultural item and strip it of its meaning.

Several tools are available to help individuals and corporations make informed decisions when using Indigenous cultural symbols, including one developed by IPinCH in 2015.