There has been a great deal of fuss in Canada lately about unfortunate comments made with regard to cultural appropriation. At issue here is a great deal of speculative fiction. Would this make Farley Mowat guilty in writing about arctic explorers and Inuit culture? Taken to its extreme would this mean that women should not write romance novels about men, cowboys for example? That would eliminate 75% of the genre. Do you need to be a member of the military to write about it? An ethnic minority to report on it? Would science fiction and fantasy even be possible?
Our museums are filed with pilfered cultural artifacts and even corpses. Indigenous peoples have suffered cultural and physical genocide. I understand that they are taking an opportunity for some push back but feel that the present emotional tirade is going too far. Certainly writers should be called to account for inaccuracies and miss-representation but to go further is to disavow most reportage and deny the possibility of human empathy.
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