{"id":6383,"date":"2017-06-30T08:00:41","date_gmt":"2017-06-30T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/?p=6383"},"modified":"2017-06-20T15:22:40","modified_gmt":"2017-06-20T22:22:40","slug":"mark-watches-gargoyles-s02e25-heritage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/markwatches.net\/reviews\/2017\/06\/mark-watches-gargoyles-s02e25-heritage\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Watches ‘Gargoyles’: S02E25 – Heritage"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the twenty-fifth episode of the second season of Gargoyles<\/i>, the team travels to an island off Canada to deal with a young man\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s destiny. Intrigued? Then it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time for Mark to watch Gargoyles<\/i>.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trigger Warning: For discussion of racism against indigenous\/Native people.<\/b><\/p>\n

This is a case where as much as I might want to dissect this, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not sure I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m qualified to do so. On the surface, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s admirable that Gargoyles<\/i> wanted to do a story that featured Native and indigenous people and<\/i> cast voice actors with Native\/indigenous heritage for these three new characters, but the more I think about \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Heritage,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d the more I can see glaring problems. Like, really<\/i> glaring problems, ones that are obvious to me even though I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t claim any Native or indigenous heritage myself. I have no cultural ties to these communities, so I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to speak for<\/i> them, if that makes sense.<\/p>\n

So I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll just go with the obvious stuff, the things that are part of such pervasive anti-Native tropes that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t think<\/i> I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m overstepping any boundaries in describing them. I say this because I got the sense that \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Heritage\u00e2\u20ac\u009d 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 \u00e2\u20ac\u0153limited\u00e2\u20ac\u009d because the application of two real-world issues is done so without any real context, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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.<\/p>\n

Like the idea that they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re all interchangeable. Y\u00e2\u20ac\u2122all, 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<\/i> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 my god, this isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t how this works! Writers wouldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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.<\/p>\n

This deserves its own paragraph: DEATH TO ALL PAN FLUTES IN ACCOMPANYING SOUNDTRACKS TO DENOTE NATIVE OR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE. STOP DOING THAT. IT\u00e2\u20ac\u2122S SO AGGRAVATING.<\/p>\n

But it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the story of Nick that this episode commits two other obvious sins. (I am certain there are more, but again, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m 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<\/i> 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s just the ~shallow~ reason why Nick avoids his destiny and his culture, which has such ugly implications. Like, if Native folk just believed<\/i> harder, their economic problems and all the state violence they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re subjected to would just end?<\/i><\/p>\n

Do I think the show intended to say that? No, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what it comes off as. The same goes for Grandmother, who\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 look, eventually, I thought we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d get her name, but no, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s all she\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s culture is important, only to then pull the rug out from it all and say that it came from Oberon<\/i>. What about agency? What about this culture\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right to independence and self-determination? How much of that is based on what Oberon told Grandmother to do? Like, she claimed she couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t interfere in human events, but I feel like this whole episode shows her doing just that.<\/p>\n

There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s so much more here, including the cultural appropriation, which I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t 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\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d probably claim this was diverse representation. But representation is useless if we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ask ourselves how<\/i> a group is represented on screen. The execution matters more<\/i> than just the act of putting non-white characters into works of fiction, and I wish that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d gotten here. I suppose I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m not all that surprised, given that Elisa herself is black and Native, and yet we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve never gotten any specificity for that either. Oh, lord, I hope they don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t eventually mess that up.<\/p>\n

The video for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Heritage\u00e2\u20ac\u009d can be downloaded here for $0.99<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mark Links Stuff<\/b><\/p>\n

-\u00c2\u00a0Please visit my new site for all announcements<\/a>. If you’d rather not have to rely on checking a website regularly, sign up for my newsletter instead<\/a>! This will cover all news for Mark Reads, Mark Watches, and my fiction releases.\u00c2\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"