Quote: Alliance and Appropriation

What needs to be provided by non-Aboriginal people is an articulation of their role rather than a repackaging of Aboriginal thought. To do otherwise is to appropriate both Aboriginal experience and Aboriginal writing. This particular appropriation is dangerous as the appropriation is masked behind standard Canadian liberalism (equality as sameness for all). It is masked under a false and misleading understanding of Aboriginal Peoples that is gained solely from academic readings and not from lived experience. You cannot quote from an article that I have written in the same way that you can quote from a piece by a non-Aboriginal person. It is time non-Aboriginal people began to take seriously the issues of their appropriations of Aboriginal thought; afterall, it's colonialism dressed up 1990's.

-- Patricia Monture-Angus