“tribe” is not quite as specific a term in most places. I think it would be interesting to know exactly where the shirts were designed, and who made the purchasing decisions. A quick internet search shows that “new to the tribe” kids clothing is an oddly popular thing. I kind of doubt that the beverage shirts are part of the same collection.
That being said, the store management should be tuned to local sensibilities.
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Please read my comment above, about context.
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The juxtaposition: there’s a lot of stereotyping around native americans and being alcoholics. Things like “oh, they’re just genetically predisposed towards alcoholism” and the like because they have very high rates of alcohol related deaths. It’s also a big thing in period stuff: you trade them “fire water” for their pelts and whatever else, even moreso than guns.
Don’t feel bad about missing it though, I had to stare at it for a while going. “Yeah, I guess the shirts aren’t exactly the best” before I looked over to the sides and it call came together.
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Where I live? The main targets for racism are Native. You’re right, @falcon2001, it’s not a dogwhistle. Dogwhistles are more subtle than that.
Maybe JCP head office didn’t approve, but this is way too well crafted to be anything but deliberate. I spent too many years working retail: what caught my eye was the surround. Most setups would keep the two themes together with each other: the wine and beer shirts would have one display, the Tribe ones another. Two, as other people have pointed out, it takes planning and work to put these kinds of things together. There is discussion.
And that’s not even getting into the mess that all of these shirts are on multiple axes.
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I find it offensive as a Jewish person as well.
Oh, I know. I’m just not sure it wasn’t done out cluelessness by some teenager who didn’t realize the significance. Which to be clear still means their manager wasn’t paying attention which they should have been. And it remains possible it was some racist asshat doing it for yuks.
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This includes a great discussion on the real Pocahontas story.
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perhaps the same manufacturer is responsible for both sets of designs.
I’m from Italy, so a thing that is racist in USA in not percevied as that in Italy, like blackface. Look to me that the shirts in question taken alone are a bit tacky but I interpreted the arrow not a reference of western movies but as a follow the leader indication, and the problem with alcohool and native americans is a thing I’ve heard, but here is not a stereotype, because native americans in Italy are a minuscule portion of the populatino.
In my family we spelled it Pennet which with the silent “t” sounds even more classy.
Tribe Leader could be a Big Macher
nothin wrong with “love my tribe” for us
“new to the tribe” might be someone happy to have converted.
Plus we do love wine!
I didn’t know they still existed.
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Welcome to Boing Boing, new comrade!
And what an original first post!
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“I’m a space alien who just happened to teleport to earth just two minutes ago, and I stumbled on to this forum because I detected these broadly unrelated concepts were being assembled together to arrive at a highly illogical conclusion. Here, let me get out my dictionary… See, I was correct.”
Citations and evidence or it never happened. Full disclosure, I’m not a big fan of ICTM, but even in their post Halbritter buyout days, languishing under an ex-Playboy editor’s leadership (you can’t make this shit up), they produced moderately decent journalism as it pertains to the interests of Native people on this continent.
Says yet another anonymous white man on the internet.
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etsy has thousands of examples of this trope.
https://www.etsy.com/market/tribe_tshirt
quite a few involve teepees.
there’s a subgenre that involves “crew”. As in “leader of the crew”, “new to the crew”, etc…
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ok. With some trepidation, I’ll bite.
Here’s their story on Bear Ears
Now, count the times that quotes are attributed either to a release, or to a statement.
Looking at it from an outsider’s perspective, I’d think that this was a huge story.
This atlantic article from when the monument was created.
emphasizes that native Americans were a driving force behind bear ears.
On Wednesday, with a stroke of his pen, Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument. The monument grants federal protection to the twin geological formations that rise above the horizon, which are called “Bears Ears” in English and nearly every local Native language. It also protects the more than 2,000 square miles of desert and shrub that surround them—a land of hidden canyons, soaring peaks, and starry, silent nights.
For the coalition of environmentalists and Native leaders who had long sought protection for the land, it was a momentous victory.
“It actually brought tears to my face,” said Eric Descheenie, a former leader of the inter-tribal group that had long lobbied for the monument. “It’s so significant. It’s so hard to even try to add up what this really means. At the end of the day, there’s only a certain place in this entire world, on earth, where we as indigenous peoples belong.”
and yet, there’s very little of that sort of journalistic passion in the ICMT story. There may not even be anything to distinguish the story from what did appear in the New York Times, or the Washington Post.
But, I’m clearly not their intended audience, and maybe my instinct to look for an indigenous perspective on what could just as well be covered as a Washington story is fundamentally driven by neocolonialist ideology.
Did you ever think that maybe, JUST MAYBE, an outlet like ICMN has just a few less dollars to do investigative journalism than does the Atlantic or the NYC and is forced to rely on statements and releases, as well as citizen journalists with far less professional training than those other outlets?
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I wasn’t saying the shirts are or aren’t racist, just that they seem non-specific.
It’s not that I think these shirts are great, as other people have pointed out, they are sexist and appear to be mis-using the word tribe to mean a single family unit, when the traditional definition of tribe means several families living as a group.
It seemed to me that the imagery was painting with a broad brush, but maybe there are other factors like the shape of the arrow or the patterns in the clothing that are reminiscent of native american culture.
I suppose as a white male, I am not as attuned to this kind of thing as indigenous people, so I apologize if I am being stupid.
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ah. A few less dollars may be an understatement.
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Precisely. Halbritter offloaded it onto the NCAI, and presently it hasn’t much of an operational budget. The hope is at least for some of us Natives, that they put the entire Indian Country archive online, because they’ve been a very crucial news source for Native concerns since back in the day, and in the heyday they did some fine investigative journalism.
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