Starbucks Under Scrutiny Over Fictional Symbol in Native American Heritage Month Poster
nativenewsonline.net
Popular coffee chain Starbucks is under scrutiny after a symbol on a poster celebrating Native American Heritage Month resembles the same one used in the animated children’s show “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Popular coffee chain Starbucks is under scrutiny after a symbol on a poster celebrating Native American Heritage Month resembles the same one used in the animated children’s show “Avatar: The Last Airbender.”

Starbucks locations around the country have displayed the posters in break rooms, back offices, and in view of customers, Business Insider reported.

The outrage comes as the misconceptions about Native Americans persist through the continued exploitation and misinterpretation of Native Americans in advertising, merchandising, and trademarks amongst popular brands. The National Musuem of the American Indian in Washington D.C. houses a permanent exhibit titled “Americans” that features ads, toys, film clips, toys, weapons and hundreds of other Native-themed objects, illustrating the paradox of everpresent false Native depictions in popular culture and absence of actual Native representation.

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    • detalferous@lemm.eeEnglish
      121·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for those links. That is incredibly!

      If the truth came out years after Voyager, that would have been a bit of an embarrassment for the folks behind the show. Here’s the really weird part of this story, though: The big exposé on Jackie Marks came a decade before the show debuted. First an Assiniboine-Sioux researcher looked into the guy’s claims and debunked them, and then the Washington Post covered the story, and the National Congress of American Indians kicked him out. Jamake responded by walking back some claims initially, but later claiming that he was suffering discrimination for being adopted or being mixed race. 

      In fact, even when he died in 2001, the press gave him obituaries that took him at his word. One paper called him “an award-winning American Indian writer” and declared the following, falsely: “Mr. Highwater was born to an illiterate mother, who was a Blackfoot, and a Cherokee father, who was a rodeo rider and stuntman. The impoverished parents soon deposited the boy in an orphanage.” Which newspaper was that? Oh, just the Washington Post, the same one who’d broken the news of his fraud 17 years before.