One theme of these celebrity apologies is that the offending party’s intentions were pure and the outrage has come as a great shock. “I am deeply sorry if what I wore during the VS Show offended anyone,” tweeted Kloss. “If we wrongly stepped on anybody’s sacredness, then we’re sorry about that. That was never our intention,” said Coyne. “We deeply apologise if it has been misinterpreted or is seen as offensive as it was really meant to be a tribute to the beauty of craftsmanship,” said Chanel. These controversies reveal not a conscious denigration of Native Americans but a complete failure to consider the implications of using a ceremonial headdress as a cute prop.
For this reason, Keene has come to question the comparison she made in her 2010 blogpost between “playing Indian” and blackface. “I’m starting to think it’s not the most apt comparison,” she says. “Folks who don blackface for Halloween realise it’s a mocking thing but most of the people wearing headdresses think of it as a homage to native peoples and some misguided attempt at ‘respect’. It’s a very different approach. It’s not that they’re doing it maliciously, they’re just coming at it in completely the wrong way.”
Fifty years ago, Native Americans were routinely demonised in popular culture. Marlon Brando, a passionate supporter of the American Indian Movement, famously dispatched Native American actor Sacheen Littlefeather to the 1973 Academy awards to reject his Best Actor award and read from a statement in which he accused Hollywood of “degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character”. The problem now is more subtly pernicious. Native Americans aren’t villainised but romanticised as brave, noble figures from the distant past, and this obscures the problems that communities face today.
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