Sunna Juhn ’18 and Emily Ratté ’18 recently wrote about businesses engaged in appropriating, unpaid, images, products and knowledge of indigenous communities, for a piece in Intercontinental Cry, a non-profit newsroom underwritten by the Center for World Indigenous Studies.
“With $1400, you could buy an iMac or a trip to Europe. You could also buy a designer jacket … inspired by designs stolen from indigenous Maya communities,” they wrote in “Intellectual Extractivism: The Dispossession of Maya Weaving,” based on a talk given at Amherst in the spring by Angelina Aspuac and her colleagues at the Guatemalan Association of Maya Weavers.
“The stealing and appropriation of Maya textiles and designs contributes to the slow erasure of indigenous peoples from the cultural map of the world,” they wrote.