Now you know why Chakotay didn't have a recognizable Native ancestry. https://heavy.com/entertainment/star-trek/jamake-highwater-voyager-fake-native-american/
If he had had a specific one then a lot about him, including a revelation like this, probably could/would have seemed more offensive. The grass is always greener somewhere else.
Not if it was done authentically, with participation from someone actually from the culture in question. Reducing a real culture to a white person's generic image of it is not as respectful as white people tend to assume it is. The professed goal is to avoid being offensive to any specific culture, but that implies that you expect to be offensive no matter what. It's admitting that you can't be authentic if you're portraying it from outside. And inventing a generic, fictionalized caricature is just surrendering to that ignorance of the real thing. It's more offensive to the genuine culture because it perpetuates the practice of excluding them altogether. It leaves them invisible, which is even worse than trying imperfectly to portray them. And that's why you need actual participation, actual diversity on the creative side. If you want to depict diverse characters and you don't have the inside knowledge of the culture, then you hire writers who do. Or you hire an actor who's from that culture or subculture and let their real-life experience guide your writing, like the Discovery staff has with Blu del Barrio as Adira. And of course, there would be no revelation like this if they'd had a genuine indigenous consultant or writing staffer in the first place.
To that end, it would have helped if the Voyager creators had had some clear idea of which NA culture or cultures they wanted Chakotay to belong to: they could have consulted knowledgeable members of those specific cultures. It goes without saying that they should have vetted the guy they did hire more carefully -- Marks was first unmasked as a fraud in 1984, long before he went to work for Voyager -- but apparently they weren't the only ones who fell for this con artist long after his exposure. His fake history was even included in his obituary, in 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamake_Highwater
Star Trek has always been so intensely AmeriEuro-centric that sometimes I wonder if it takes place in some bizarre alternate reality where Sun Tzu was the only Asian human who ever wrote a book. And since that definitely applies to Voyager, it kind of makes me think Chakotay being Native American was just pandering, without sincere intention. Like somebody said, "Indian magic is hot with the demo right now, can't you put some of that in? Sure, you can hire a cultural expert, just don't hit the budget too hard." I feel awful about it.
It’s LA centric. Enterprise showed how well they handled the English, and TNG with it’s ‘French’ Captain, and ‘Irish’ manages to get badly handled across three series. I believe Geordi was supposed to be African, and even Trip in Enterprise was a good ole stereotype. (Let’s also not forget the country and western singer in TNG...) Chakotay almost gets off lightly.... at least there’s the benefit of him coming from a *fictional* group unique to Star Trek to a certain extent. Much of his stuff seems more South American, and his Tat is almost Polynesian.
Well it was 1994, and the internet was very early times, So the "normal" depiction of Indians were in a bunch of feathers, doin Oh Oh Oh.. so very bad. Trek atleast went in the direction of trying to do a decent depiction. Could have they done more? Yep. But I do give them the kudos of atleast trying. Now the idea of the person they hired being as Fake as a Orange Tan, kind of depresses me, especially if he was known as a fraud 10 years before hand. And I do agree with the others of either giving him an actual Native American tribe and base him on that tribe, or maybe a mix of a few tribes as 300 years latter some intermixing might have happened. But some of this outrage is applying Today's morals/ethics/etc. to yesterdays time, this was over 25 years ago.
It wasn't nearly that bad. That's more the '60s stereotype and earlier. And it's not like the Internet was the first source of information ever invented. By the '90s, there had been a number of more positive and progressive portrayals of Native Americans, like Michael Horse's deputy character in Twin Peaks or Colonel Ironhorse in War of the Worlds: The Series. If anything, that was the era when the stereotype was overly romanticized -- an ancient, noble people deeply attuned to nature and spirituality, that sort of New Agey thing. You see a lot of that in Chakotay. Far from being an exception, his characterization was very much in line with the typical pop-culture portrayals of Native American culture at the time. After all, there had to be a reason why someone like "Highwater" pretended to have Native ancestry he didn't have. He was capitalizing on that romanticized, idealized image, that New Age fascination with the culture. I'm sure that indigenous viewers at the time had the same objections. The only difference now is that white people are belatedly catching on.
@Christopher I agree, but the internet comment is a reason why, because the information wasn't out there unless you went to a library. Which the average viewer usually didn't go to to fact check representations on t.v.. They relied on tv to get it right. Which they didn't.. And social media to call them out.
Just... no. It wasn't the Dark Ages, damn it. There were many ways to get information before the Internet. There were newspapers that you could get delivered to your door every day or buy at any store or sidewalk vending machine. There were weekly news and entertainment magazines that people subscribed to. There was the nightly news on TV and cable channels like CNN. People didn't need the bloody Internet to follow the Watergate hearings or to watch the Moon landings or to keep abreast of developments in the Cold War. If anything, the Internet has made it exponentially harder to get reliable information about the world, because there are so few filters for lies and propaganda and ignorant nonsense from self-appointed experts. There's vastly more information now, but most of it is crap.
However there are plenty of resources now that wasn't available then. Unless you subscribed to a industry magazine you wouldn't know that chacoteys portrait was wrong. I wasn't versed in native american portrails back then and had no idea it was wrong. And since I only had rabbit ears back then local news didn't report on star trek. Now a days if something like that happens we have a load of sites normal people visit to call it out. So yes. It WAS a bit of the dark ages. And representation and getting cultures right is better now because of the internet and people bring aware of it.
They didn't try very damn hard, if the only consultant they could come up with was an outed phony who they completely failed to vet. It's not exactly hard to find Native American tribes in the American Southwest, and it wasn't hard then, either. Thinking of options available in the 1990s, the obvious solution would seem to be: pick which tribe you want to base your depiction on, and call (or better yet, fly out) to discuss the matter with a tribal leader. He or she could either tell you want you wanted to know, or set you up with an expert who is actually accredited. Christopher mentioned another option: Robert Beltran does have Native American heritage, but he wasn't reared in any Native American culture. He didn't have the knowledge or experience to help inform his portrayal of Chakotay. Nothing against the guy, but maybe if instead of him, the Voyager showrunners had looked to hire someone who actually had a tribal affiliation, that actor could have helped them to give Chakotay some authenticity. No, people were objecting then too. Especially Native Americans. Just checking off a box. Voyager did at least choose a Latina actress to play the first Latinx character of the franchise, B'Elanna Torres -- but then they focused entirely on the character's Klingon heritage, and never touched on her Latina aspect at all.
Technically, Jose Tyler from "The Cage" was supposed to be Latino, but they cast a white actor in the role. (And they never even spoke his name in the episode.)
Graham Greene would have been an interesting casting choice for Chakotay, but I think he'd have been wasted on Voyager due to their writing.
One of the big problems is that while in the United States a lot of Native culture has survived, south of our border is a different story. Overall a lot has been lost. I remember that there was outcry at the time because Robert Beltran was generally considered to be Mexican. Many Americans failed to realize that the majority of people in central and south American are of native ancestry. Most have no idea what that is. Seems the people in this discussion are much better informed than than the average Star Trek fan when Voyager premiered. With accurate cultural information lost, it takes careful study to piece together what the cultures may have been like. Some traces remain in Catholic traditions peculiar to certain areas. Archaeology opens other doors. But reconstructing some of those cultures would be next to impossible. I think Voyager did an admirable job of giving us insight on what a group who lost their culture and wanted adopt a more native culture might come up with. And at that point in the future, it could be many generations old. So while a lot of it is just BS, I think in the end it fills a whole that really does exist. Could they have done it better? Of course. But when you look at it in terms of Star Trek, they did a fair job. They did more with that character than the USSR based Checkov, or the tiny snippet of African they gave Uhura. And TNG didn't really get into their characters cultures. We have Picard saying Merd a few times and the family winery in France, and Yar's earth colony history. But they spent far more time on the non-human cultures and just let the Federation be a mix. DS9 touched on Sisko's cultural heritage, but that is also American rather than African. Chakotay I think was the first time they delved into an Earth culture that was not American.
The problem, though, is that VGR initially based Chakotay's made-up culture more on elements of societies from what's now the United States. It wasn't until "Tattoo" that they started to go for a more Central/South American heritage to better reflect Beltran's ancestry. So that's a valiant attempt to rationalize it, but it doesn't quite work.
Ahh, the Berman era, where you were supposed to applaud the productions for their "progressive" characters, no matter how inauthentic and paper-thin.
And of course, his literal tattoo. To be honest, I find the whole ‘latinx’ thing an odd Americanism. Kind of an unpleasant one. Not only because of the different indigenous cultures (still present or otherwise) in South America, but also because it others a whole bunch of Europeans too. Really clumsily. I mean it may be surprising, but turns out there is a difference between Portuguese and Spanish. And even more shockingly, a difference between the European states and their former colonies. The designation ‘latin’ is even ridiculous, because French is also Latin derived as a language (and of course Italian) but we don’t call New Orleans Latin American. It’s basically just silly Dulux colour chart segregation and racism again. So I was kind of glad they focused more on B’Ellana’s Klingon side, and her ‘orphan’ nature, rather than making another mess. They would have had her playing some castanets, then taking up embroidery and dancing the Tango before asking Janeway to set up a chapel on ship, and then the ultra-atheists would be beating their drum twenty years before NuBSG peed in their cereal. In the grand scheme of things (I’m looking at you, Vulcan Reed.) Chakotay really was better served. I mean, he didn’t wear a feathered hat or run a casino in the Holodeck, so there’s that.
While I wouldn't argue that it's better to avoid the issue of B'Elanna's human ethnicity than to handle it badly and resort to clichés, if the series/franchise wants credit for showing characters of various ethnicities, shouldn't they try to do it well? Yes, of course the terms "Latinx" and "Latin" are far too broad to really be useful descriptors, but it's not as if the series gave us any way to narrow down B'Elanna's human heritage. Even the name "Torres" is used both in Spanish and Portuguese. The only descriptor I can find for the actress's ethnicity is "Hispanic," which rules out Portuguese and suggests South or Central American heritage rather than direct descent from Europe. I keep coming back to @Christopher's comment, above, about how Discovery gives the non-binary character Adira authenticity by drawing on the real-life experiences of Adira's portrayer, Blu del Barrio, also a non-binary person. Could Voyager have given Torres's human side a credit's worth of authenticity by drawing on the real-life experiences and cultural knowledge of her portrayer, Roxann Dawson? Or, barring that, could they at least have tried not going out of their way to make everything about her human side as unrelentingly whitebread as they did? I mean, her dad's name was John, her uncle's name was Carl, and she had three cousins named Elizabeth, Michael, and Dean. Her favorite foods were things like banana pancakes and fried chicken. She read romance novels and was good at math and athletics. Whitebread.