3 Causes for Cultural Appropriation

I see three causes for the cultural appropriation, romanticized emulation and stealing of other peoples spiritual practices, culture and regalia:

1) There's a deep hole within me as a person living in [blanket word forthcoming] Modern Western World. The hole was created by various forms of enslavement, colonialism and trauma in my culture through the centuries. Deep Forgetting. This painstaking longing the hole creates leads me to seek, like an addict, quick fulfillment. Intact or semi-intact indigenous cultures can provide that, (the risk is here to plunder a culture like Earth's resources-no respect, asking or acknowledgment.)

2) Looking for my own roots is HARD. I need to sift through centuries of bloodshed, fear, forgetting, and the reality of coming from a line of both colonized and colonizers. For me this is scary, and brings up a lot of anger and heartbreaking grief.

3) If, as Tia Oros Peters (Zuni Nation) says, the language and culture come from the Land, to reconnect with my culture, my practices and my Self, I need to learn to Listen to the Land. To Listen to the Living Earth. Whaaat? That is Hard. It requires me to slow down and get in touch with a whole array of tools and perceptions I have not been taught to engage.

I stumble in finding the right words, a way to express myself that is nourishing to your ears and mine.  I am in a process of finding my language on these topics.
I will likely be messy, botchy, make no sense at times, piss someone off, or annoy you with these writings. Hopefully there will be inspiration and beauty as well.
I have an intention of moving from an inspired and inspiring place and I need to move through my anger, grief and impulse to blame.
Thanks for staying with me.

Whiteness. Privilege. Belonging.

PERSONAL POST COMING:

Whiteness. Privilege. Belonging. 

What does it mean to belong? Where does our/my pain spring from?

The question of belonging has been with me since I was a young child.

I feel an unspoken solidarity and kinship with "poor people". 
People who have struggled with financial hardship and who have had do with less. I know this place, I have felt the struggles, wrestled with the anger of financial oppression, with the feeling of belonging to a "lower cast". When I hang out with friends that have known that pain, there is a sense of "yeah, you get me".

I feel an unspoken solidarity and kinship with people of color (POC). 
This is deeper and subtler to the external eye.
This has two layers:
I am an Italian living in America land. I have seen the looks directed my way, the struggles in articulating myself in a broken English, a mainstream culture of people seemingly different than me, and when I first landed here, a group of new cool people that I so longed to belong to.
Even considering my struggles and levels of internalized oppression, my skin is still white and I enjoy a lot of the privileges that white peeps have (ex. the media culture is mostly tailored to people that look like me).

On Italian soil, a similar story repeated. Mom and Dad from Southern Italy, me born and raised in Northern Italy. 
The prejudice for having a last name ending in A (meaning you and your family are from the South - and likely to be poor, uneducated, lazy, and dark). For being called a "Terrone" (a derogatory term that literally, and ironically, means "of the Earth").
Internalized racism. Subdued anger and confusion.
When I hang out with friends that have know the pain of marginalization and oppression because of how they look or because of the legacy that one carries in their last name, I feel kinship, there is a sense of "yeah, you get me" (AND I have No idea of what it is actually like to have experienced what they have).

And, at the same time, I feel a kinship with White (gigantic, mono-cropping term) people. After all I have been raised in a industrialized culture, I benefit from my language dexterity, and from my looks and skin color. 

Yet when I hang out with White folks (like me, and at the same time, not-like-me) I sense a tension, a fear in speaking about cultural issues such as cultural appropriation and racism.

What may be going on with white people?

In my experience as a white person, I often feel tentative in speaking about these issues. I do not want to offend others or mis-speak, I want to be and look "evolved", politically correct and personally respectful.
It's easy to feel like I'm walking on eggshells. 
These topics are new and no one has really taught me how to face them fully, I'm learning as I go and meet others who teach me and I'm bound to make mistakes.

Let's go a layer deeper:
My experience of white culture and white people is of facing the loss of connection to ancestry, roots and land (and this is, of course, true of many POC).
The trail is lost in a past of colonization, slavery and enslavement, industrialization, and the frenetic run towards progress, towards bigger and better, and the cancellation of the past, the roots, the family, the simple, the slow. It's easy to feel like I don't know who I am, where I come from, and it's even easier to mask those confusing feelings.

I hold a white-person guilt from what has been perpetrated and continues to get perpetrated from people of my same skin color. The pain and injustice continues unconsciously through me, by me participating in the structures that keep the power imbalance the way it is today. I am working to change that within me and without me. I am thankful to those that help me see my blindspots.

May I remember Roots..connection with the Mother. The Earth. 
To know I am basically held, that I am safe. 
Let the healing continue. Lots of work ahead. 
My sleeves are pulled.

A Poem

I want to know about the Grief

That lives in the shadow of your bones

I want to know if you remember

When the troops came to your people's land

How they set fire to huts

How they took your grandmother's ancestral tongue

How they split the trees, broke the bones, spilt the blood

How they impregnated the People with New Gods

How they buried what was Holy and Wild 

And aught you to Hate the Untamable 

Eradicating the memory of being Free.

How the arrogant, violent frenzy

Destroyed everything is Sight in Mind in Heart.

Conquered. Colonized. 

Strip Mined.

I want to know if you can 

Shed the tears that

the wrinkles around your grandfather eyes could not.

I want to know if you can let your Tender Heart Heal

If you can let your tongue re-member

the people, the land, the culture, the waters, the wild, the songs, the sun, the food, the prayers, the screaming cries of new life

That relentless Force of Life 

Bringing the Seeds of your People to new Shores

the Indigenous song that still lives in you.

I want to know 

If you can connect to Dirt once again

and to the heartbeat 

under your feet.

                             ~Fabio Fina