I’m indigenous Canadian and the weird part for me is that I know the opposite of this. I have family and friends from Six Nations in southern Ontario. They are Mohawk and I know a couple of war veterans who were part of the Canadian forces in WWII.
When they came back there was so much normalized racism that they couldn’t identify as indigenous because they would be excluded from jobs and even owning or running businesses. As identified indigenous people they were given a hard time for employment, banking and buying or owning real estate.
So a lot of them identified themselves as Italian Canadians in order to get by.
Don’t care if he was Sicilian. His “crying Native American” anti-littering commercial made a huge impact. It says a lot about the US that you don’t see these kinds of PSAs anymore.
My only complaint about that is growing up native, there were several times when a person I had just randomly met would look at me and say, are you native? To which I would say yes I am, and they would say what tribe, and I would say Lakota, and they would say if I throw this piece of trash on the ground will it bring a tear to your eye? And I would then murder them.
That PSA may have prevented a lot of littering but it also cost a lot of lives.
Plenty of Native Americans who could have filled those roles, and were doing actual environmental activism instead of a kitchy, fake act. He did it for profit.
Is it just me, or does his head seem like it’s popping out of the picture?
