September 6th 2012
We start
talking about first nation art in class. Everything they said always draws me
back to my own culture - Chinese. The western people were saying that
native art & culture were dying. In my opinion, the natives
are marginalized and native art & culture has never even existed
to the western world and it is just not part of their dominate
culture.
In some sense, first nation art & culture is almost like a
foreign culture to them. I could compare the native culture to my own which is
Chinese. To those people in the dominate society today, when they think of
native culture, "Moccasins shoes" would probably be the first thing
to come up, like fortune cookies for Chinese, UGG
for Australian, Queen for English and Tacos for Mexican. Their interest
of foreign cultures was selective due to
their limited accessibility.
I could truly relate to the dominate society's view. To
keep a culture alive, population plays a big role. This is why the general
Chinese culture is still alive and well known over the world. From Silk Road to
today's globalization, Chinese culture is relatively more accessible
then some native cultures. However, some of our own natives’ cultures in China
are dying as well. China have 56 ethnic groups and 55 of them
only constitute 8% of the Chinese population. Han which is the
dominate in China, constitute 92% in Mainland China and 98% in
Taiwan. Therefore, it is hard to keep tracking of what others have been doing
when you don't have the accessibility to the ethnic cultures.
I think the government of all the countries which has
natives should put in more effort to save and promote them.
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