Do Native American youth assimilate popular culture like most other kids?
Oh, yeah. But because the traditional culture has always been attacked from the outside, a lot of kids haven’t been raised with any knowledge of their own culture. Their culture is not being validated in the school process. I mean, you turn on the radio and you don’t hear the Badlands Singers, you don’t hear the Black Lodge Singers, you don’t hear a traditional drum group. On almost every FM station you hear U2, you hear rap songs, you hear 50 Cent. It’s interesting, though, how we can take on stereotypes, too. You know, we’ve appropriated other cultures. For a while, there was such negativity against African-American culture—but then you had fry bread being presented as Indian soul food. You had the Temptations being blared out by these Native fancy dancers, who began adding R&B and hip-hop to their tape collections. From my perspective, there seemed to be an excessive amount of self-congratulation among non-Indians for their “wonderful” treatment of Native peoples in movies like Danc
