Rather than focusing on the January 6th insurrection and its context, I would like to consider how Joan Donovan, Emily Dreyfuss, and Brian Friedberg define a “meme” in Meme Wars: The Untold Stories of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America and what some of the potential implications of that definition are. In the “Introduction,” they discuss a video of “Elizabeth from Knoxville” as a prime example of a meme, explaining that it was “a memorable piece of media that resonated with people for different reasons. The video clip of her was recontextualized, remixed, and redistributed, carrying all sorts of meanings” (Donovan et al. 2). Throughout the book, the authors maintain this relatively capacious definition. They note, for instance, that a phrase often associated with the events of January 6th – “Stop the steal” – was itself memetic (Donovan et al. 4). In short, their definition does not require that a meme have a single identifiable form to be considered a meme; it can be an image, video, slogan, or idea as long as it is widely circulated on the internet and “recontextualized, remixed, and redistributed” in the process.
While I appreciate the openness of this definition, I cannot help but wonder if it is overly capacious and perhaps in tension with the authors’ attempts to situate memes and their impact as a new phenomenon. They write, “On January 6, pundits and people across America and the globe were shocked by what they saw…. We were not shocked. For those who had been watching these [meme] communities… the events of that day were entirely foreseeable” (Donovan et al. 9). Through this statement, they position memes as something so new and unique within American political culture that most professional commentators were entirely unprepared to account for them in a meaningful way. I do not doubt that there is some truth to these claims. But, as someone whose work is primarily informed by Indigenous studies, I am always wary of such gestures to “newness” and “uniqueness.” As scholars like Kyle Whyte (Potawatomi) point out, settler-colonialism constantly uses the specter of “unprecedented” and “urgent” crises as a way to ignore Indigenous epistemologies and justify further violence to Indigenous communities (55). For example, the framework of “the Anthropocene” envisions contemporary climate change and environmental degradation as relatively recent crises, ignoring that they are – to quote Max Liboiron (Red River Métis/Michif) – “an enactment of ongoing colonial relations to Land” (6). The context and stakes for memes are obviously quite different, but I still think it is worth questioning the temporal narrative implied by Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg.
To illustrate this point, I would like to turn to two examples from Indigenous meme culture. In “Decolonativization,” the sixth episode in the second season of Reservation Dogs, the protagonists attend a “Native American Reclamation and Decolonization Symposium Youth Summit” on their reservation. The summit is led by MissMa8riarch and Augusto Firekeeper, both of whom are clearly meant to be parodies of online influencers. When introducing herself, MissMa8riarch offers a land acknowledgement. It begins in a standard fashion, mentioning that the summit is taking place on the traditional homelands of the Caddo, the Osage, and the Muscogee. But then MissMa8riarch announces, “Before them were our Neanderthal relatives, so acknowledge them. And before that, even, the Dinosaur Nation. Dinosaur Oyate, you know? Before that, the Star People. Also our reptilian relatives above and below earth.” Following this speech, MissMa8riarch and Firekeeper ask the protagonist to engage in a variety of inane trust-building activities that they describe as doing the work of “decolonization.” At the end of the episode, one of the protagonists, Cheese, asks the two influencers what they mean by “decolonization.” Unsatisfied by their very literal response, he clarifies, “I know the definition. What I was asking is how are the things we did today supposed to do anything?”
These two scenes – MissMa8riarch’s land acknowledgement and Cheese’s question about decolonization – critique the process of meme-ification and yet became memes in their own right. Cheese’s question implicitly references “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” by Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K.Wayne Yang where the authors disavow “the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences” (2). They argue that decolonization is only decolonization when it involves “the repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (Tuck and Yang 1). Thus, Reservation Dogs points out that “decolonization” as a term has itself become a meme emptied of its original specificity by the likes of MissMa8riarch and Firekeeper. Much the same can be said for the concept of land acknowledgements, which the episode suggests have also become something of a meme. The intent behind land acknowledgements – to draw attention to the continued survivance of Indigenous communities and the non-inevitability of the settler-colonial project – has been lost because white liberals appropriated it as a “settler move to innocence” (Tuck and Yang 9). MissMa8riarch’s humorous attempts to thank “Dinosaur Nation” – which does nothing to address settler-colonialism – became an immediate inspiration for online memes. One such meme, posted to Instagram by “@ndn.memer,” features the cast of The Land Before Time beneath a text box that reads: “How the spirits of our ancient relatives look as we acknowledge the land is traditional dinosaur territory” (see below).
If one were to focus exclusively on the way that concepts like decolonization and land acknowledgements have become memes, detached from their original meaning and purpose by the aforementioned machinations of white liberals, one might concur with the assessment in Meme Wars that memes are both new and potentially quite damaging to contemporary political discourse. But – as the Land Before Time meme demonstrates – memes can also be a way to call out and correct these problems. This suggests that memes might not be the problem – or, at least, not exclusively the problem – but are instead the site where the problem (and occasionally its redress) occurs. In “‘Since Time Im-MEME-morial’!: Indigenous Meme Networks and Fan-Activism,” Jacqueline Land observes, “Indigenous meme artists lay claim to meme-making as Indigenous practice tied to traditional culture and decolonial action and use the form to map Indigenous presence within digital platforms” (184). Rather than understanding memes as a purely unique or novel form, it might be more generative to think of them as the current conduit for much older social formations and relational practices. Indeed, the use of memes here is a clear manifestation of Indigenous survivance, which Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) defines as “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent” (1).
As a further illustration of this point, I would also like to consider a meme posted “@nsrgnts” featuring a shot of five Indigenous characters from Disney’s Peter Pan sitting in front of drums (see below). Speech bubbles have been added above the characters, creating a joke about dating a woman from a different tribal nation that most certainly was not in the original film. The use of Peter Pan is noteworthy because the Indigenous characters in the film are now widely regarded as among the most racist caricatures to appear in any piece of Disney media (a crowded field, to be sure). The meme subversively reimagines these characters but contrasting the stereotyping assumption that inform their appearance in the film with what they might realistically say while talking to each other. Once again, this subversion is neither novel nor unique to the meme format. In Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of Native Americans in Film, Michelle H. Raheja (Seneca) notes that Indigenous actors working in the early decades of the American film industry were asked to play highly stereotypical roles. But they often undermined these stereotypes by saying curse words or talking casually amongst themselves about unrelated topics when asked by white filmmakers to speak in their respective Indigenous languages onscreen. Raheja argues that these actors “appropriated the narrative and visual conventions of the film medium stereotypes of themselves for their own interests and to their own ends and… strived to display tribally specific knowledge” (30). The Peter Pan meme might be understood as a reworked manifestation of this tradition. To be sure, the meme provides a new format for expression, but the expression itself is not new.
I remain somewhat suspicious of any narrative that frames memes as a novel and determinant force in sociocultural and political spheres (memes, for instance, did not create the white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies that Donald Trump mobilized during his presidential run and eventual presidential tenure), but I also do not want to deny the significance of memes entirely or suggest that they do not bear further scrutiny. To effectively interrogate memes, though, I suspect that one might need to actively consider the different forms that they take, which is precisely what Donovan, Dreyfuss, and Friedberg largely avoid in their initial definition. As previously noted, I appreciate the capaciousness of their definition, but I also wonder if that quality makes it difficult to discern the characteristics of memes that are genuinely unique. Per this definition, the word “decolonization” and the Peter Pan joke can both be understood as memes that function as conduits for a broader and, frankly, much older set of discourses and practices. But their forms are very different – the former is a term that primarily circulates in academic and activist spaces, while the latter is a combination of image and text shared and circulated on Instagram. To avoid reproducing settler moves to “unprecedented” and “urgent” crises, I think it is important to fully situate these “memes” in their historical and cultural contexts. But I also think it can still be extremely generative to consider their distinct formal characteristics and how those characteristics might shape the role they play in these ongoing discourses and practices (for instance, digging into the specifics of how a word like “decolonization” became meme-ified versus why the text and image format associated with social media has become an especially vibrant site for reappropriating older racist caricatures).
Additional Citations:
Land, Jacqueline. “‘Since Time Im-MEME-morial’!: Indigenous Meme Networks and Fan
Activism.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 2021, pp. 181-186.
Liboiron, Max. Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press, 2021.
Raheja, Michelle H. Reservation Reelism: Redfacing, Visual Sovereignty, and Representations of
Native Americans in Film. University of Nebraska Press, 2010.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization:
Indigeneity, Education, and Society, vol. 1, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1-40.
Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance:
Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor, University of Nebraska Press, 2008, pp. 1-23.
Whyte, Kyle. “Against Crisis Epistemology.” Routledge Handbook of Critical Indigenous
Studies, edited by Brendan Hokowhitu, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Linda Tuhiwai-Smith, Chris Andersen, and Steve Larkin, Routledge, 2020, pp. 52-64.
