PSA about hipster headdresses

An e-mail from a North Carolina college student named Jessie titled "Hipster headdress PSA for school project."For this project, we have to choose a social issue and create a 30-second cellphone ad promoting the issue. I chose the appropriations of Native American culture, specifically the hipster headdress phenomenon and how it is degrading to native peoples/uses stereotypes/etc.

I think to make the anti-appropriation PSA better, I was wondering:

What is the most important piece of information you want someone to take away from this message of anti-appropriation?

What would be a succinct, easily-remembered message?

Who would be the target audience?

What group or groups would you like for the psa to link to?My response:

Interesting question, Jessie. You could do a good PSA just by alternating photos or video clips of hipsters in headdresses with pictures of Indian leaders past (e.g., Tecumseh, Osceola, Sitting Bull, Geronimo) and present (e.g., Vine Deloria Jr., Wilma Mankiller, Russell Means, Winona LaDuke). Have the narrator, preferably an Indian, recite a narrative over the images.

What is the most important piece of information you want someone to take away from this message of anti-appropriation?

1) Indians aren't chiefs from a 19th-century Plains tribe. They aren't primitive people of the past who wear headdresses and buckskins and live in teepees. They're modern people who are all around you: senators, astronauts, movie stars, doctors, lawyers, teachers.

2) That Indians revere headdresses and the feathers that comprise them. That these headdresses are to be worn only by Indians who have earned the privilege. That hipsters wearing them makes a mockery of Indian beliefs and customs.

What would be a succinct, easily-remembered message?

"Stop Misusing Our Sacred Feathers. Stop Stereotyping Us."

And finally:

"We Are Not Chiefs."

Who would be the target audience?

The hipsters themselves, presumably. Perhaps the whole young generation that thinks it's a post-racial world so it's okay to appropriate and wear headdresses. Anyone who doesn't understand that Indians are still around and defending their cultures from stereotyping and appropriation.

What group or groups would you like for the psa to link to?

I don't think there's an organization dedicated to fighting hipster headdresses. Maybe an anti-mascot group. I'll have to think about that and see if I come up with anyone.

Rob

P.S. Send me a copy or a link when it's done!



More on a contact organization

I asked around, but there's no one organization that handles hipster headdresses, sports mascots, or Native stereotypes in general. A lot of organizations handle these things as part of their mission, but I'm not sure anyone has a national organization dedicated to them.

Nevertheless, some possibilities:

National organizations: National Congress of American Indians. Morning Star Institute (not sure if it has a website). American Indian Movement (regional chapters only?).

A Facebook organization (don't know if it exists outside Facebook): For Accurate Indigenous Representation (FAIR).

Native Appropriations, the blog that's done the most to promote the "hipster headdress" meme.

Information sources: AISTM (http://www.aistm.org/1indexpage.htm), Blue Corn Comics (http://www.bluecorncomics.com/mascots.htm).

For more on the subject, see The Hipster Headdress Challenge and Why Hipster Headdresses Aren't Okay.