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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7852419" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, to the extent that is true, it is clothing worn by a specific culture - not by warriors or special people within that culture.  It is a time of costume dress for people in that culture.   So your analogy with the Marine uniform and "stolen valor" doesn't work, because not only does the whole specific meaning thing only work for a few nations, but it doesn't really mean that any more.  Secondly, I think you'll find that dressing up like Pope Francis is a thing, and hardly anyone gets offended by it. There are performers that dress up as the Pope as a form of comic entertainment, the Pope gets satirized both lightly and with more venom, and you can buy Pope costumes for Halloween. There are even Pope Francis latex masks you can buy. No mass protests are occurring, and they aren't making the news. And certainly, to the extent that someone actually does get offended by it, like perhaps our Spanish Catholic friend here on the boards who is sensitive to the portrayal of Catholics, no one gives him the time of day about his feelings and if he speaks up about them he'll probably just get mocked and shut down about it. So let's not for a second pretend by this new false analogy that you are in any fashion applying a universal standard.Yes, but wearing another cultures formal wear isn't disrespectful. That puts it back on par with kilts and saris.And now we are starting to get down to the brass tacks. Does this whole colonialism thing make a big difference? That, and not analogies to Popes and Marines, is where this becomes a discussion.Personally, I think they lost their identities because they didn't have a written tradition. With that, they have a lot in common with the Silesians or the Vistulans - whoever they were. But who their identities are now has really nothing to do with who they were pre-European contact, any more than your or my identity is defined by that. The question becomes is are they really locked into being this quaint pre-historical culture that looks like Indians for the tourists because that's what they want to see? For the Cherokee, for example, a big part of their identity is square dancing, and the whole big plains Indian headdress and all of that 'looking like an Indian' is just something some of them do to bilk the gullible tourists. Traditional Cherokee garb doesn't look anything like that. Now that they've got casinos and other more sophisticated methods of extracting money from the tourists, you see less of that sort. My argument against dressing up like an Indian on Halloween would proceed from a different direction.</blockquote>

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