The above incident happened this Halloween at the Rhino Room on Capitol Hill last October. The young woman and her boyfriend “went as Indians, Pocohontas,” the young woman wrote on Yelp.
At the Henry Art Gallery’s annual gala on February 6, three donors appeared in Native headdress.
The following Tuesday, the museum asked Seattle Met magazine to remove photos of those donors from its web site, said museum spokeswoman Dana Van Nest. The magazine did remove the photos. (Seattle Met did not respond to my request for comment.)
The gala’s theme was “Dress [Up]: Let It Go To Your Head,” illustrated with a drawing of a woman with a hairdo stuffed with whimsical birds and ships.
After receiving a complaint to The Stranger, I contacted Van Nest and asked her about it. Apparently, the Henry either did not register the potential problem that night, or ignored it.
“We don’t know if the guests of our table host identify as Native,” Van Nest told me. “I saw the photos online, saw that someone had made a ‘??’ comment, and made the decision to pull the images.”
Dear Cultural Organizations: This is going to happen at your doors. There are, evidently, plenty of people who do condone making a costume of marginalized cultures, to use the Rhino Room’s cogent words. So please consider your stance, like the Rhino Room did, and be ready to defend it.
