A few weeks ago, I was approached by Indigenous journalist Robert Jago, who was looking to do a podcast episode about cultural appropriation—with a focus on Sasquatch as his main case study. He asked me for an interview, and sent me a list of questions, some pertaining to my (glancing) involvement in the Canadian media tempest surrounding cultural appropriation in early 2017.

(By way of background: I came out as a cultural universalist in a May 12th, 2017 newspaper column—a viewpoint that proved to be very much at variance with the prevailing posture among my progressive colleagues at the magazine I then edited. When I joined Quillette later in 2017, I remained interested in the topic.)

The issue remains a point of fixation within the field of Canadian arts and letters, and so I told Jago that I was reluctant to simply sit in front of a microphone and shoot from the hip. While I might thereby offer a few interesting quips, I told him, I was more likely to say something that (at least in decontextualized form) would simply rekindle all the old animosities that surrounded this subject five years back. So instead we agreed that I’d send Jago some thoughts in written form and, on that basis, he’d decide if I had anything specific to say that was worth including.

I’d intended to jot down a few brief speaking points. But, as anyone who knows me at all might have predicted, I ended up emailing Jago a somewhat lengthy manifesto, which follows in (lightly) edited form. Jago’s podcast episode has now been published, with some of my thoughts included in it. And I invite Quillette readers to listen and decide for themselves where the truth on this issue lies.

“Cultural appropriation” typically gets defined in a way that depends on whether one is defending it or denouncing it. If you’re defending it, you prefer to look at the big picture: Every new kind of art form, literary genre, style of dress, or cuisine typically represents a mix of inherited and borrowed elements. Shakespeare’s sonnets were written in an Iambic pentameter that Chaucer had “appropriated” from the French and Italians. So if Indigenous or African poets want to appropriate it from the English, no one has any basis for complaint. If you define cultural appropriation in this big-picture way, the concept isn’t just permissible. It’s artistically necessary, and indeed inevitable.

But if you’re denouncing cultural appropriation, on the other hand, the argument is more persuasive when your frame of reference is small, local, and community-rooted. I’m thinking of the (white) novelist or film director who passes through a region, and hears some garbled version of folklore that relates to a nearby Indigenous community. The guy thinks, “Oh wow, that’ll make a great novel” (or TV show, movie, etc.), and then makes a mint without consulting (let alone cashing in) the Indigenous community.

So the debate over cultural appropriation is like a lot of debates: It’s really easy to win if you get to define the terms. And since both sides pick definitions that suit them, it can become a dialogue of the deaf.