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In Black Panther’s now famous museum scene, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) responds to the museum curator’s statement, “These items aren’t for sale,” with the ever resonant: “How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it like they took everything else?”
In three concise sentences, Killmonger summarizes all that is wrong with the modern museum and the colonizer mentality that displaces sacred items far from the peoples to whom they belong, with no recourse for return or even acknowledgement of the cultural and social theft that has occurred in the process.
Over the course of four films and a fifth on the way in 2023, archaeologist-adventurer Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is positioned as an American hero as he travels the world in search of objects and information that he claims will contribute to the collective and global knowledge bases represented by the Western university system.
“It belongs in a museum,” Dr. Jones constantly says, firmly situating himself in the exact same camp as those whose cultural appropriations he is constantly fighting against. According to Dr. Jones, these artifacts don’t belong in just any museum, they specifically belong in his university museum, where he can conveniently get credit for securing them. Also, Indiana Jones seems to have forgotten that the museums of his own era aren’t exactly accessible to general audiences, let alone the peoples from whom the objects have been taken.
From the perspectives of those who have been violently colonized and experienced the horrors of forced assimilation and even genocide, the modern museum is not the bastion of knowledge that Indiana Jones and his allies pretend it to be. Rather, it’s a glorified display of wanton grave-robbing from around the world, the results of the looting of sacred sites and culturally valuable items justified through a lens of white supremacy.
There is very little in a museum that actually belongs there. But through the Indiana Jones franchise, the exact opposite is promoted as Dr. Jones and his colleagues continue an ongoing pillaging project that takes them through Central and South America as well as the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as they meddle in the trafficking of items that categorically don’t belong to them, often across continents. This vicious dynamic is framed within a white savior narrative that is inherently racist even before we get to the actual events on screen in Indiana Jones movies.
Raiders of the Lost Ark opens with Indiana Jones in Peru breaking into a tomb, stealing a sacred idol, and replacing it with a bag of sand as booby traps set off all around him. Thanks to Jones, this one act sets off a series of events that lead a group of Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant as they seek immortality for their designs of global domination.
“I hate Nazis,” becomes another Indiana Jones catchphrase, and he ably defeats some of them in Raiders. Ironically, though, Nazis were actually inspired by the United States’ very own Jim Crow laws, centuries of slavery, and institutionalized racism that Nazis actively used and integrated into their campaigns to eliminate Jews, Romani, disabled, and LGBTQ communities altogether.
Raiders might have taken place in 1936, but Jones’ narrative distancing from the reality of his own era actually reflects a 1981 perspective that had already begun whitewashing the slavery and segregation eras of American history through this adventure tale. There are multiple levels of colonization going on in Spielberg’s opus, extending far past what’s on screen.
Things only get worse as the franchise rolls on through the years. As a Sri Lankan American who has lived in India, I have found myself haunted by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom‘s open racism against Asian countries and cultures as monoliths. From its Chinese villains to Indian ones, Temple of Doom literally demonizes Asian people on screen, presenting Indians in particular as snake and monkey-brain eating savages who kidnap and subjugate children while worshiping a demonic fictionalized version of Hindu goddess Kali who demands human sacrifice.
If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me what monkey brains taste like I could put a down payment on a house, even in this economy. Worse, Temple of Doom wasn’t even filmed in India. It was actually filmed in Sri Lanka; you can even hear the villagers speaking Sinhala in the fore and background, not Hindi.
Here we see Indiana Jones’ colonizer, white savior mentality infest the screen as Spielberg collapses two distinct cultures into one Brown lump for white audiences, correctly assuming nobody would know the difference between India and Sri Lanka, and forever setting a cultural wallpaper that includes levels of depravity and savagery decades later that real-life South Asians still can’t escape when in the Western gaze.
In the next Jones adventure, The Last Crusade, the man in a panama hat (Paul Maxwell) who uncovers the Cross of Coronado in Utah that a young Indy (River Phoenix) fights as a teenager is framed as a villain. Yet, Indy goes on to base his field “look” as an adult on this supposed villain. Indy believes himself to be better because his motivation isn’t money but rather intellectual colonization — as if that’s somehow more noble. It isn’t.
All the while, this third installment of the Indiana Jones franchise conveniently leaves out how the Knights of the Crusades were themselves colonizing forces across the Middle East and Europe, converting people by force and mass murdering those who refused. It also once again frames Nazis in opposition to good Americans, leaving out crucial pieces of the USA’s history that inspired the Nazi’s genocide and global domination projects.
By the end of Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, we find out that Indiana Jones actually does understand that some things categorically do not belong in a museum. In Temple of Doom he returns the Shivalingum stones of the Mayapore people to them, restoring their thriving village and overthrowing the evil maharaja (who was backed by colonial British forces). By the end of Last Crusade he realizes that some objects are too powerful for public awareness, let alone consumption as he allows the Holy Grail to disappear into the deep mountain cavern of Alexandretta.
This indicates that Indy has always known that museums aren’t the end all, be all repositories for artifacts. He only applies that knowledge selectively. When Indiana Jones returns 20 years later in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for the first time he is dragged into a deadly artifact hunt against his will. But his racist and culturally insensitive quips have not changed, nor does he yet have the self-awareness to recognize he is exactly the same as the colonizers out there seeking to enrich themselves or unnaturally increase their power.
Ultimately it’s not just Indiana Jones who’s a colonizer, it’s also the entire creative team of Spielberg and company who have and continue to promote a racist, colonial gaze decades past its expiration date. Reviving a franchise as problematic as this one in the current context of encroaching fascism in the United States and whitewashing American history in schools so as not to make the colonizers’ descendants feel badly about their past sends the opposite message to what we need.
Even if Indiana Jones 5 situates itself in the civil rights era of the 1960s, will it address and take responsibility for all of its own colonizer legacy over the years? Or will it bury its head in unacknowledged past missteps, continuing to promote a historically inaccurate version of an American good guy with a gun? If it’s not self-reflective and retroactively professing attrition for the many harms the figurehead and stories have caused, we categorically don’t need it.
What we do need is for museums to return all the items they’ve looted from around the world, and most especially the sacred and religious ones.
In Black Panther’s now famous museum scene, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) responds to the museum curator’s statement, “These items aren’t for sale,” with the ever resonant: “How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it like they took everything else?”
In three concise sentences, Killmonger summarizes all that is wrong with the modern museum and the colonizer mentality that displaces sacred items far from the peoples to whom they belong, with no recourse for return or even acknowledgement of the cultural and social theft that has occurred in the process.
Over the course of four films and a fifth on the way in 2023, archaeologist-adventurer Dr. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is positioned as an American hero as he travels the world in search of objects and information that he claims will contribute to the collective and global knowledge bases represented by the Western university system.
“It belongs in a museum,” Dr. Jones constantly says, firmly situating himself in the exact same camp as those whose cultural appropriations he is constantly fighting against. According to Dr. Jones, these artifacts don’t belong in just any museum, they specifically belong in his university museum, where he can conveniently get credit for securing them. Also, Indiana Jones seems to have forgotten that the museums of his own era aren’t exactly accessible to general audiences, let alone the peoples from whom the objects have been taken.
From the perspectives of those who have been violently colonized and experienced the horrors of forced assimilation and even genocide, the modern museum is not the bastion of knowledge that Indiana Jones and his allies pretend it to be. Rather, it’s a glorified display of wanton grave-robbing from around the world, the results of the looting of sacred sites and culturally valuable items justified through a lens of white supremacy.
There is very little in a museum that actually belongs there. But through the Indiana Jones franchise, the exact opposite is promoted as Dr. Jones and his colleagues continue an ongoing pillaging project that takes them through Central and South America as well as the Middle East, Africa, and Asia as they meddle in the trafficking of items that categorically don’t belong to them, often across continents. This vicious dynamic is framed within a white savior narrative that is inherently racist even before we get to the actual events on screen in Indiana Jones movies.
Raiders of the Lost Ark opens with Indiana Jones in Peru breaking into a tomb, stealing a sacred idol, and replacing it with a bag of sand as booby traps set off all around him. Thanks to Jones, this one act sets off a series of events that lead a group of Nazis to the Ark of the Covenant as they seek immortality for their designs of global domination.
“I hate Nazis,” becomes another Indiana Jones catchphrase, and he ably defeats some of them in Raiders. Ironically, though, Nazis were actually inspired by the United States’ very own Jim Crow laws, centuries of slavery, and institutionalized racism that Nazis actively used and integrated into their campaigns to eliminate Jews, Romani, disabled, and LGBTQ communities altogether.
Raiders might have taken place in 1936, but Jones’ narrative distancing from the reality of his own era actually reflects a 1981 perspective that had already begun whitewashing the slavery and segregation eras of American history through this adventure tale. There are multiple levels of colonization going on in Spielberg’s opus, extending far past what’s on screen.
Things only get worse as the franchise rolls on through the years. As a Sri Lankan American who has lived in India, I have found myself haunted by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom‘s open racism against Asian countries and cultures as monoliths. From its Chinese villains to Indian ones, Temple of Doom literally demonizes Asian people on screen, presenting Indians in particular as snake and monkey-brain eating savages who kidnap and subjugate children while worshiping a demonic fictionalized version of Hindu goddess Kali who demands human sacrifice.
If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me what monkey brains taste like I could put a down payment on a house, even in this economy. Worse, Temple of Doom wasn’t even filmed in India. It was actually filmed in Sri Lanka; you can even hear the villagers speaking Sinhala in the fore and background, not Hindi.
Here we see Indiana Jones’ colonizer, white savior mentality infest the screen as Spielberg collapses two distinct cultures into one Brown lump for white audiences, correctly assuming nobody would know the difference between India and Sri Lanka, and forever setting a cultural wallpaper that includes levels of depravity and savagery decades later that real-life South Asians still can’t escape when in the Western gaze.
In the next Jones adventure, The Last Crusade, the man in a panama hat (Paul Maxwell) who uncovers the Cross of Coronado in Utah that a young Indy (River Phoenix) fights as a teenager is framed as a villain. Yet, Indy goes on to base his field “look” as an adult on this supposed villain. Indy believes himself to be better because his motivation isn’t money but rather intellectual colonization — as if that’s somehow more noble. It isn’t.
All the while, this third installment of the Indiana Jones franchise conveniently leaves out how the Knights of the Crusades were themselves colonizing forces across the Middle East and Europe, converting people by force and mass murdering those who refused. It also once again frames Nazis in opposition to good Americans, leaving out crucial pieces of the USA’s history that inspired the Nazi’s genocide and global domination projects.
By the end of Temple of Doom and Last Crusade, we find out that Indiana Jones actually does understand that some things categorically do not belong in a museum. In Temple of Doom he returns the Shivalingum stones of the Mayapore people to them, restoring their thriving village and overthrowing the evil maharaja (who was backed by colonial British forces). By the end of Last Crusade he realizes that some objects are too powerful for public awareness, let alone consumption as he allows the Holy Grail to disappear into the deep mountain cavern of Alexandretta.
This indicates that Indy has always known that museums aren’t the end all, be all repositories for artifacts. He only applies that knowledge selectively. When Indiana Jones returns 20 years later in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, for the first time he is dragged into a deadly artifact hunt against his will. But his racist and culturally insensitive quips have not changed, nor does he yet have the self-awareness to recognize he is exactly the same as the colonizers out there seeking to enrich themselves or unnaturally increase their power.
Ultimately it’s not just Indiana Jones who’s a colonizer, it’s also the entire creative team of Spielberg and company who have and continue to promote a racist, colonial gaze decades past its expiration date. Reviving a franchise as problematic as this one in the current context of encroaching fascism in the United States and whitewashing American history in schools so as not to make the colonizers’ descendants feel badly about their past sends the opposite message to what we need.
Even if Indiana Jones 5 situates itself in the civil rights era of the 1960s, will it address and take responsibility for all of its own colonizer legacy over the years? Or will it bury its head in unacknowledged past missteps, continuing to promote a historically inaccurate version of an American good guy with a gun? If it’s not self-reflective and retroactively professing attrition for the many harms the figurehead and stories have caused, we categorically don’t need it.
What we do need is for museums to return all the items they’ve looted from around the world, and most especially the sacred and religious ones.
Exhausted by the self-help craze twenty-two years ago, the Secret Society of Happy People decided to step back and recognize that even as life challenges us, happiness happens. The group decided pursuing happiness can be an intentional practice.
Now August is celebrated as Happiness Happens month. Expressing happiness as a personal practice can be daunting, so here are five activities to help encourage authentic happiness to happen in our lives this August and beyond.
Quality Time in Solitude
Alone time provides the space to recharge our batteries and reflect on our lives. Practicing intentional solitude can encourage empathy, creativity, and productivity.
When was the last time you were able to spend some time alone with your thoughts, a book, listening to music or people-watching? Observing people can be a source of endless entertainment accessible to all of us at any time. Sitting down with ourselves and reading a book for pleasure for an afternoon can change your mood and lighten perspective. Gardening or allowing yourself time to binge-watch a show you love is equally nourishing activities that can make you connect to your special happy place.
Alone is not lonely; learning to embrace the difference is a key element to building a lifetime practice of unconditional self-love.
Conscious Dance
Image-RhythmTherapy Creative Arts Salon
Episode 3 of Lizzo’s reality show Watch Out for the Big Grrrls is titled “Curves and Confidence.” Lizzo’s dancers encounter their first conscious dance class led by sensual body movement expert Rashida KhanBey Miller. The class was a sensual embodiment experience that allowed the Big Grrrls to connect to moving their bodies without judgment outside the constrictions of choreography or the gaze of an audience.
With joy-filled tears in my eyes, I witnessed the ladies’ relationship to movement in their bodies transform after the experience. I’ve been a conscious dance facilitator leading my RhythmTherapy Creative Arts Salons for over 14 years. I’m grateful to Lizzo for sharing conscious dance with the world on her Emmy-nominated series to normalize this movement style to Black women.
As a Black woman, to dance outside the limitations of someone else’s choreography is an expression of freedom that I don’t get to experience in this body in most situations. Leading conscious dance classes, particularly the past two years during the pandemic, I’ve witnessed thousands of people experiencing full body autonomy for the first time.
But you don’t have to go to anybody’s class to experience consciously loving your body unconditionally and expressing yourself without judgment. Connecting to joy through dance is as easy as popping in your favorite song and dancing like nobody’s watching. Guess what, nine times out of ten, nobody cares if you dance in your happy place; in fact, your ability to connect to your happy place just might be contagious.
Home Cooking
Good food is glorious, especially when made with loved ones. When non-essential workers were working from home, lots of folks felt the need to hone their culinary talents by preparing meals made from scratch. From complicated processes like baking the perfect loaf of sourdough bread from homemade starters to putting together prepared meal kits, home cooking became cool again.
As soon as pandemic restrictions lifted, the majority of us hung up our aprons and ran back to restaurants without looking back. But there’s something special about food made at home with love.
One of the most valuable gifts we can share with young people is the ability to cook. Chefs like the author of Black Panther: The Official Wakanda Cookbook, Nyanyika Banda, are using their culinary talents to craft cookbooks based on films and TV shows. Kids of all ages enjoy cooking together and sitting down as a family to enjoy the fruit of their labor.
Cooking is universal, and if you’re single and fabulous, you’re not left behind. There’s nothing like taking the time to cook something you love for yourself and then enjoying a meal cooked with your own hands. Bring a smile to your face by cooking something yummy to make your tummy smile.
Spending Time in Nature
I recently interviewed writer Baratunde Thurston about his PBS series America Outdoors. One of the most valuable gifts his mother passed on to him was a love of nature. Even though Thurston grew up in Washington DC, his mother would round up Baratunde and his friends from the neighborhood, pack their station wagon, and take the boys out to a national park to camp, hike, and spend time exploring creation. Thurston recounted how other parents in the neighborhood were grateful to his mom for making the outdoors an adventure for his friends in the neighborhood.
We also talked about the stigma the outdoors holds for so many Black Americans. Thurston noted, ”I’ve gotten more sensitive to the complex Black history associated with the outdoors. Because of my mom, I didn’t grow up with a fear of the outdoors. I didn’t grow up with a traumatized relative, who was like, ‘We were forced to work in the outdoors, forget the outdoors. I’m staying up in this air conditioning.’”
It’s easy to feel FOMO about going out in nature if you’re not used to being an outdoors person. Doing the work to find ways to embrace easing into nature in ways that feel right to you is worth it. GirlTrek is a Black women’s health movement that makes the outdoors accessible, affordable, and less intimidating. You don’t need any special equipment, and if you don’t have the resources to get yourselves out on the trail, you can strap on your sneakers, go outside, and take a walk for thirty minutes near your house while listening to one of GirlTrek’s Black empowerment themed podcasts. Or, you can find a crew you vibe with and walk together in community or on the trail.
Whether you’re happy going in the wilderness for a hike or your vibe feels alive taking walks in your neighborhood after dinner with friends or family, spending time in nature is sure to raise your happiness vibration.
Celebrating Victories
If you read the Black Girl Nerds article “Set Goals Not Resolutions for 2022,” and you achieved or are on your way to achieving your goals, take time to celebrate. Whether your goal was personal, professional, or financial, recognizing the work it takes to complete a task successfully is vital to your personal practice of happiness. Knowing you “did good” is particularly sweet when a challenge is difficult to achieve. Celebrating victories is one of the sweetest parts of life. How can you not be happy after completing a task challenging you to grow?
I love this quote by Father Alfred D. Souza, “Happiness is a journey, not a destination.” When we think of happiness as a practice rather than a goal, we allow ourselves to witness life in real time. Difficult times are sure to arise, but recognizing August as Happiness Happens month is a reminder to take time to recognize, nurture, create, and appreciate when happiness happens all year long.
The saying goes that the first murder is the hardest. For Olivia Foxworth (Jemima Rooper) in Lifetime’s new miniseries Flowers in the Attic: The Origin, the hardest is her first turn of the outside lock on a door in the east wing of Foxworth hall that leads to an infamous attic. No, this moment is not the one where she locks her four grandchildren away.
This first turn of the key is years before when Olivia and her perverted husband Malcolm (Max Irons) lock up his 19-year-old stepmother Alicia (Alana Boden), pregnant with Malcolm’s rape baby. A baby who would one day become the Corinne Dollanganger we know from VC Andrews’ still-scandalous Flowers in the Attic. She marries her half-brother and eventually schemes to kill off their four children to access her significant inheritance. Depravity runs in the Foxworth family.
VC Andrews fans are a peculiar bunch. So many of us read the books way too young in the 80s and were forever marked by the twisted story. Even those coming to the Flowers in the Attic series more recently go through the same shock as we younguns did back then.
This disturbing five-book tale of incest, child abuse, generational trauma, and arsenic-laced donuts has aged like gothic wine in a blood-soaked barrel thanks to VC Andrews’s lyrical and compelling prose. Yet the film adaptations have left much to be desired — filmmakers shied away from taking the source material as seriously as it has deserved. That is, until Lifetime’s new miniseries, Flowers in the Attic: The Origin.
The show is based on the posthumously published, Garden of Shadows: a prequel started by Andrews before her death and finished (rather perfunctorily) by her ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. The Origin takes its time developing the back story. The Origin also adds important important new characters and fleshes out existing ones to make a three-dimensional portrait of Olivia and the Foxworths unlike any that has existed on the screen to date — or even comprehensively in the source material.
In Garden of Shadows, Olivia Winfield begins as an unattractive, cold, hardened, and bitter woman whose resentments, in particular, towards other women only grow. It’s easy to imagine book Olivia would eventually reap such cruelty on children and even delight in it. But the Olivia Winfield of The Origin created by writers Connor Good, Amy Rardin, and Paul Sciarrotta, is brought to painful life by the extraordinary Jemima Rooper. She has a much more dramatic character arc that is so compelling we end up at times rooting for her, even though we all know where her horrible story ends.
In The Origin, Olivia begins as a genuine, intelligent, and independent woman who gets sucked into Malcolm Foxworth’s world of abuse and is broken down by it over the decades. Her process of disillusionment is heartbreaking to witness. Unlike the book where Olivia has her own money and could leave at any time, always choosing the violence of remaining, The Origin’s Olivia is trapped by a lack of economic opportunity. This makes her descent all the worse.
“I met a man who turned out to be a monster,” Olivia says and The Origin becomes a cautionary tale about how spending extended time with a monster will inevitably turn you into one, too. It also shows how religion can be used to manipulate a traumatized person to lead them to things they never imagined doing, but can now do under the eye of a vengeful god-figure.
Yet through Jemima Rooper’s exquisite and controlled performance, she never fails to portray Olivia’s innate humanity. This is one of the most challenging characters, arguably of all time, and Rooper has managed to embody her with empathy and compassion. Thanks to Rooper’s artful character development, Grandmother Olivia has gone from a stock villain to a complicated woman whose life went off the rails — and she could never get it back on track. I never, in my VC Andrews-loving life, imagined I’d ever feel anything but disgust for Olivia. Now I do. Give Jemima Rooper an Emmy for each part of this series already.
But Jemima Rooper isn’t the only marvel in The Origins. The writers have added key new characters in housemaid Nella (T’Shan Williams) and her daughter Celia (Evelyn Miller), two of Malcolm Foxworth’s original victims. The fact that they are Black adds an entirely new level of nuance that this story needed as Nella’s family becomes the conscience and heart of this gruesome tale.
Their presence also acknowledges Virginia’s Confederate history and the Foxworth family’s history of slave-owning — an important detail left out of Andrews’ books entirely. That Malcolm Foxworth essentially developed his future MO as a rapist and serial predator of Black servants. This reflects a history of the south that many conservatives are trying to erase from the history books.
Nella also gives us fresh contexts in which we witness Olivia’s own privilege through her whiteness. She denies to herself that she and Nella are friends, even though she knows nothing of Nella, her family, or even the fact that Olivia’s own husband had abused her. When Nella finally calls Olivia out on the power dynamic of servant and mistress, Olivia flips into Karen mode.
She reminds Nella that Olivia has promoted her “beyond her station” and could take her livelihood at any moment. This was such a white woman interaction that Black and other women of color experience regularly, with a varying spectrum of awfulness, even now, 100 years after the events of The Origin. Olivia Foxworth in this iteration is all too real, on so many levels.
The Origins has also made Olivia’s second son Joel (Luke Fetherston) explicitly gay. This is something only suggested in the book — and incredibly eschews the “bury your gays” trope. The writers reimagined Joel’s story from the book of a freak, accidental death in an avalanche and instead turned it into a stint in a sanitarium to cure his homosexuality resulting in his escape from the toxic Foxworth family with the man he loves, Nella’s step-grandson Harry (Jordan Peters). Finally, someone gets a happy ending in Flowers in the Attic. Maybe we will get a Joel and Harry spin-off series one day.
The fantastic new characters aren’t the only thing that sets this miniseries apart from every other VC Andrews adaptation. The female gaze is ever present in The Origins. It serves to handle so much difficult content sensitively, including scenes of sexual assault that contribute to the plot and character development. The production value is stupendous. Every actor is on point. There are no hokey performances here to be found, even if Malcolm’s southern drawl might come and go.
One of my favorite things is how, once again, there is a new version of Foxworth Hall itself. We could read this as a continuity error, but I interpret it as the inconsistency of memory. Nobody remembers things the same. We often don’t even remember our own memories as they happened, especially after trauma. It serves an internal logic that every on-screen version of the Foxworth mansion looks different, and The Origin’s version is it’s most imposing.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is the adaptation of our weirdly beloved VC Andrews stories fans have been waiting decades for. Finally, someone took the books seriously and put together a production that matches the tone and content, bringing the story to life in its most realistic version yet.
I sincerely encourage Lifetime to follow in The Origin’s footsteps and create a miniseries of each book in the Dollanganger series. All of those so-bad-it’s-good adaptations could use a proper retelling that embraces the gothic power and horror of these twisted tales, rather than the camp. The Origin sets a new bar not just for Flowers in the Attic and VC Andrews adaptations, but book-to-screen adaptation in general: a rare example of the miniseries far surpassing the book.
Flowers in the Attic: The Origin is streaming on Lifetime TV and Lifetime Movie Club.