Mark Watches ‘Gargoyles’: S02E25 – Heritage

In the twenty-fifth episode of the second season of Gargoyles, the team travels to an island off Canada to deal with a young man’s destiny. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Gargoyles. 

Trigger Warning: For discussion of racism against indigenous/Native people.

This is a case where as much as I might want to dissect this, I’m not sure I’m qualified to do so. On the surface, it’s admirable that Gargoyles wanted to do a story that featured Native and indigenous people and cast voice actors with Native/indigenous heritage for these three new characters, but the more I think about “Heritage,” the more I can see glaring problems. Like, really glaring problems, ones that are obvious to me even though I don’t claim any Native or indigenous heritage myself. I have no cultural ties to these communities, so I don’t want to speak for them, if that makes sense.

So I’ll just go with the obvious stuff, the things that are part of such pervasive anti-Native tropes that I don’t think I’m overstepping any boundaries in describing them. I say this because I got the sense that “Heritage” was written by someone who was white and who had some limited knowledge of what Native and indigenous folks face in a modern world. I use “limited” because the application of two real-world issues is done so without any real context, and it’s frustrating. Frustrating because this show is so full of brilliant, complicated stories, and frustrating because this episode upholds some pretty damning ideas about Native folks.

Like the idea that they’re all interchangeable. Y’all, we non-Native folks have GOT to stop doing this in all forms forever until the end of time. With the invocation of a specific island off the coast of Canada, I thought the show was finally avoiding this trope by and maybe talking about the Haida nation or First Nations or ANYTHING that would be specific. Yet what we get here is a confusing amalgamation of traditions and cultural artifacts of at least ten different Nations, as far as I could count. That headdress is from the Plains, some of this stuff is Hopi or Anasazi, some of it is from some vague Pacific Northwest tribe… my god, this isn’t how this works! Writers wouldn’t say someone was from America but give them a Boston accent and then say they lived in Marfa, Texas their whole life while they worked at the first Starbucks in the world. Yet this is what non-Native folks do time and time again: we assume these items are interchangeable.

This deserves its own paragraph: DEATH TO ALL PAN FLUTES IN ACCOMPANYING SOUNDTRACKS TO DENOTE NATIVE OR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. STOP DOING THAT. IT’S SO AGGRAVATING.

But it’s in the story of Nick that this episode commits two other obvious sins. (I am certain there are more, but again, I’m leaving that to more qualified people who could actually speak to them with any detail.) I was very confused by the immutability of culture here, the idea that Nick could only be part of his tribe by doing things One Way, and that way is The Correct Way. See, there is economic disparity within a whole lot of indigenous cultures or nations in North America, and I thought that by invoking that in the beginning of this episode, the writers would address that. But nope! It’s just the ~shallow~ reason why Nick avoids his destiny and his culture, which has such ugly implications. Like, if Native folk just believed harder, their economic problems and all the state violence they’re subjected to would just end?

Do I think the show intended to say that? No, but that’s what it comes off as. The same goes for Grandmother, who… look, eventually, I thought we’d get her name, but no, that’s all she’s known by. Out of everything here, I was most mortified by the decision to make Grandmother a child of Oberon. That highly, highly suggests that this tribe or Nation gained their beliefs from an outside source or that they’re based on a lie, since Grandmother never revealed to anyone that she is a shapeshifter/faerie thing. It just seems so insulting to tell us that this tribe’s culture is important, only to then pull the rug out from it all and say that it came from Oberon. What about agency? What about this culture’s right to independence and self-determination? How much of that is based on what Oberon told Grandmother to do? Like, she claimed she couldn’t interfere in human events, but I feel like this whole episode shows her doing just that.

There’s so much more here, including the cultural appropriation, which I haven’t even touched on. What worries me about this sort of thing is that I could see someone taking this in by looking only on the surface, and they’d probably claim this was diverse representation. But representation is useless if we don’t ask ourselves how a group is represented on screen. The execution matters more than just the act of putting non-white characters into works of fiction, and I wish that’s what we’d gotten here. I suppose I’m not all that surprised, given that Elisa herself is black and Native, and yet we’ve never gotten any specificity for that either. Oh, lord, I hope they don’t eventually mess that up.

The video for “Heritage” can be downloaded here for $0.99.

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