By Emily Creek

Disclaimer: Even as I write this the CDC has changed guidelines for vaccinated individuals. At the time of writing Maui county had implemented a secondary post-arrival test while the State of Hawai’i now has a vaccine passport. In July the rules will change again, and Hawaii will begin accepting all vaccines as a way of being exempt from being quarantined. At the time of writing this essay, COVID mask mandates in Maui county remained in place…you are to be wearing your mask anywhere public (walking on beach, sitting and not consuming at a restaurant, on heavily trafficked trails, etc). And the guidelines currently state that indoors and at gatherings masks must be worn. All these things add to the complexity of this essay. Despite the changes, this essay comes from the vantage point of the rules in place when written–the overwhelming impact of post-pandemic “revenge” tourism continues to deeply impact the people of Hawai’i, Maui, and specifically my small and remote community.

***

I work in a heavily trafficked destination in a remote area of Maui. What I observe daily is droves of tourists coming to hike, and a lot of discarded masks in naupaka…and not covering faces.*

Here are the Maui County rules:

1. Hawaii Safe Travels app:
   • Requires a pre-travel Covid test by select partners 72-hrs in advance of your flight. We can already see the flaw in 72-hrs–it gives a lot of space for getting exposed to covid before arriving in Hawaiʻi.
   • As of May 11, a post-arrival test is now also required for travelers.
   • You sign off–in a legally binding document–that you will follow all Maui-County and Hawaiʻi State Covid mandates, including mask wearing.
2. Within Maui County the mask mandate states that masks must be worn indoors and outside. With the exception of times when there is over 6ft of distance between parties. (Note: As of May 25 the Mask Mandate was lifted outdoors. Masks in large outdoor groups heavily recommended. Mask  mandate indoors was unchanged.)

So you’d think that the simple request to wear masks would be followed by those making the choice to visit these islands in the midst of a pandemic. Unfortunately, Hawaiʻi has a history of tourists in some cases quite literally sh*tting on the fragile natural and cultural resources of the islands. Such terrible behavior has continued with COVID-19. To understand why tourists aren’t wearing masks I believe we need to go back to history. First we will cover some of the epidemics that arrived in the Hawaiian islands as the result of “contact” and how that affects local attitudes of covid and then we will go through examples of visitor patterns of behavior over the centuries.

This isn’t the first time that disease has come to Hawaiʻiʻs shores. History gives us many examples of disease and quarantine in Hawaiʻi: Smallpox and measles ravaged Oahu particularly Honolulu and Chinatown. Inter-island travel was not allowed, people had to remain home. These diseases wiped out huge percentages of the Native Hawaiian population in a manner of years. In 1865 King King Kamehameha V signed “An Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy” sending anyone, mostly Native Hawaiians, convicted of having Hansen’s disease to the Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokaʻi. This ban was not lifted until all patients were formally paroled in 1969. Eight thousand people were taken from their families and sent to isolation. We could dig into these examples and discuss how disease coming to the islands affected the Hawaiian communities more than any other community. How lineages were lost, language and culture threatened, the long-term familial trauma of the “separating illness” that was Hansenʻs Disease, and more. But I will simply encourage readers to pick up Ma’i Lepera: Disease and Displacement in Nineteenth-Century Hawai’i by Kerri A. Inglis, which weaves together a full picture of the role of disease in the colonization of Hawaiʻi and the long term effects of disease in the islands.

So, with all of this historical trauma, we can begin to understand why residents held “Tourists not welcome” signs at airports, why residents closed off their roads to prevent entry, and why the State of Hawaii and County of Maui took some of the more drastic measures within the United States. If those entering Hawaiʻi sign off that they will wear masks why are the facebook groups in my community are filled with the following statements every single day:

“County of Maui needs to put their mask signs in more places. They come in droves and most are unmasked.”

“They come onto our property unmasked and ask us questions!!!”

“No masks huh?” [in reference to a photo of an illegal tourists]

“ ʻAʻole the masks!”

“Enough already! There is so many people at [redacted location] there is no social distancing!”

“Kids can’t go to school, we can’t have weddings or sports or graduations but this is ok?!”

“Why are fines not being given out?”

“My aunty had a gathering get shut down being ONE person over legal gathering size [keiki in the same household] but this is fine? (in reference to a massive beach party that occurred)

I could fill a 300-page book of resident complaints about tourists trespassing and not wearing masks, but these provide a glimpse of just some of the many responses.

Again, to answer this question we must look no further than the first white people to accidentally arrive in Hawaiʻi: Cook and his crew. From the first moments, people arriving in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi have debated the laws of the land. From Cook’s men attacking Hawaiians because the chiefs refused to end the kapu for him to 19th century land grabbers and the illegal annexation and overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, we have many examples of wealthy men writing home to their military to send help to allow them to get their way in the islands.  And in the end, they succeeded in taking the land. So we see history re-invent and repeat itself. (see: Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian Islands by Gavan Daws and Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen by Queen Liliuokalani for some specific examples across history).

I wanted to know a bit more from the tourist perspective so I asked a couple of visitors if they wore masks, what they knew about the rules, why they chose Hawaiʻi as their vacation spot during a pandemic and so forth. This research was informal. Although I work directly with tourists I did not ask people at my place of work. Instead, I posted an invite for people to respond on social media, and a few friends shared with people they knew who had traveled. About six people responded. The responses I received included people who said “We wore masks when needed,” and “We were comfortable coming here because of the pre-travel test.” Another response was “We knew what was on the website in regards to mask rules.” On the news and at my place of work we have had people tell us, “My state doesn’t require masks, so I am comfortable without one.” Plenty of people at work have been rude to staff, argued with us about the rules, and even gotten angry because we wear masks.

So, I leave you with this: We should not be surprised that many of the tourists who have come to Hawaiʻi to escape the stresses of their pandemic year are not following the mask and social distancing rules. Tourists have been disrespecting Hawaiian lands and cultural sites for generations. There is a mentality of invincibility when people go on vacation, and Hawaiʻi is seen as a playground. The “playground” where I live has had over fifteen rescues and five deaths in the last six months because tourists did not listen to posted signs and warnings about the weather. In the past two weeks alone we’ve had double the number of rescues. Residents pay taxes for these expensive helicopter rescues. Tourism’s hold on Hawaiʻi goes against the desires of many in my community.

Hawaiians continue to be disenfranchised from their land, their beaches, their surf, their fish, and their cultural sites. Important events like the Merrie Monarch festival and Makahiki have been cancelled–while tourists have been allowed to gather maskless at restaurants, on whale watching tours, and bring their families of twenty for weddings. Mask use highlights a much deeper problem: The immediate concern is the health of the people of these islands, but the long-term concern is the sustainability of tourism. Unfortunately the tourism authority and airlines cannot weed out which tourists will come to Hawaiʻi with respect and which will not. And to be sure, there are respectful tourists. But the pandemic has highlighted the great importance of coming up with creative solutions for the long-term benefit of Hawaii’s people and ecosystem.

Since the day Cook landed, and missionaries and businessmen began making their way here, Hawaiʻi has been seen as a place to take from. It has been a strategic, valuable, and desirable territory for outsiders for a long, long time. Today, Hawaiʻi to (many but not all) guests is an exciting and exotic get-a-way. But the laws of Hawaiʻi, be that the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi or State of Hawaiʻi, or the country of Maui, or the desires of communities, have never been respected by those coming here.

For those with money like Mark Zuckerburg and the businessmen of old, it is a place to grab land for the sake of land grabbing. For tourists and other visitors with less money, it is a place to live out any number of fantasies. Mask use, just like obeying signs posted for safety or cultural respect, doesn’t fit into the Hawaiian vacation fantasy very well. But as the pandemic continues on and visitation increases to pre-pandemic levels, we see how generations of exploitation manifest in new ways. And so this is what we are left with: overtourism, and the Hawaiian islands reaching breaking point. Masks are just one small part of a much deeper problem.

*Naupaka is a native plant that is commonly found in coastal areas in Hawai’i.

Emily is an anthropologist and storyteller. She obtained her MA at University of Denver studying the contemporary dance community in Reykjavik Iceland. Sticking to volcanic islands, she currently lives in a small community on the island of Maui where she conducts oral history work.

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In June of 2020, four months into a global pandemic and a month after I graduated from college (via a YouTube livestream while sitting on the couch in my parents’ living room), I decided to apply to be a U.S. Census Bureau Enumerator. In college I’d learned the decennial count’s importance in determining state and local budgets and, as a bit of a geography nerd, had often used Census Bureau data in G.I.S. mapping projects. Applying felt like a way I could, in a small way, counter the Trump administration’s efforts to obstruct the count. Of course, hiring for journalism jobs had also dropped off a cliff and I just needed to find some work.

After a month of training videos featuring a woman in a trench coat enumerating apartments and brownstones in some dense urban metropolis, I met my new supervisor in an empty parking lot in Davenport, Iowa. He handed me my government-issue iPhone, clipboard, messenger bag, I.D. badge, hand sanitizer and white cloth face masks in a Ziploc bag. The masks were very important, he told me—the government wanted to keep Enumerators safe.

I spent August and September enumerating—following GPS routes down long gravel roads past hand-painted “Trump 2020” barn murals to addresses the iPhone displayed, parking my old Ford Taurus in front of farmhouses and in trailer parks, pulling the cloth mask over my nose and mouth, walking through overgrown yards and trash-covered driveways, and knocking on the doors of Iowans who hadn’t returned the Census survey by the April 1 deadline. The work didn’t look much like the training videos.

I quickly learned that people aren’t thrilled to meet a sweaty, mask-wearing government employee at their door asking for ten minutes of their time and a lot of (what they feel is) private information. It didn’t take long to discover just how unwelcome I was. Late one afternoon in early August I pulled up in front of a house just off the highway and walked up to the chain-link fence. As a half-dozen dogs announced my arrival in a cacophony of barks, I felt my heart begin to race, as it always did at this moment just before uncertain confrontation. A thin man with a goatee and white tank top emerged from the far side of the home, cursing at the dogs. Raising my badge and smiling, I read the now familiar text from my iPhone: “Hello sir, I’m from the U.S. Census Bureau. Do you have a few moments…”

“What happens if I refuse?” he interrupted, smirking. He continued towards me.

I started into the next prepared response: “Well, it’s in your best interest to respond to the Census because…”

“I’m not a fan of what the Census is doing,” he responded, “and I really don’t like that you’re coming here to my house wearing a mask in this fake-ass pandemic.” By now, we were face to face. “Are we done here?” He asked, raising a fist.

After I realized he wasn’t going to whack me, I returned the gesture, bumping my fist against his. Then, shaken, I returned quickly to the car, started the engine, and pulled out of the trailer park and back onto the highway. I stopped at a Casey’s convenience store next to the Mississippi River, took a deep breath, and went in to buy a Coke and settle my nerves. As I pushed the glass door open with a tinkling of bells, everyone in the packed store turned my way, like I was a masked gunslinger from out of town come to cause trouble in their saloon. I felt their eyes on me until I’d paid and left—none of them wore masks. 

A Tale of Two Cities

I grew up in the neighborhoods I was enumerating—in rural Iowa outside the city of Davenport. I went to college just across the Mississippi River in Rock Island, Illinois. Together with Bettendorf, Iowa and Moline, Illinois, these cities form a bi-state region called the Quad Cities. Culturally and politically, there’s a long history of cooperation and conflict between these interconnected communities and states. Most of the time, Quad Citizens give little thought to these borderlands they call home—many live in one state and work in the other, traveling across the Mississippi River bridges multiple times each day. The COVID pandemic, however, brought state differences into sharp focus. Suddenly, our bi-state community felt like two separate worlds.

On March 17, 2020, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker signed an executive order mandating face coverings in public places, closing schools and all non-essential businesses and requiring residents to stay at home. Across the River in Iowa no such order came, despite criticisms from mayors of several major cities and the Iowa Board of Medicine who predicted that without an official stay-at-home order with enforceable consequences for violation, Iowans wouldn’t take self-isolation seriously. As the weeks went on, Governor Kim Reynolds did single out particular types of business for closure—bars, tattoo parlors, swimming pools, adult toy shops—but the message was clear: no need to shelter-in-place, Iowans.

We Quad Citizens experienced firsthand the confusions and consequences of this lack of consistent messaging between states. The patchwork response fractured our bi-state community. As a college student studying in Illinois and living across the river in Iowa, my daily routines suddenly became violations of Illinois’ much more stringent stay-at-home order. I could go to a bar or sit down and eat in a restaurant on my side of the river (though I didn’t, of course) but couldn’t drive across the bridge to visit my girlfriend in Illinois without risking being pulled over by police. In Iowa, I could find no evidence of an ongoing pandemic; in Illinois police guarded grocery stores and streets were eerily deserted. 

As stay-at-home restrictions were slowly loosened in Illinois over the summer of 2020, I began to do all my shopping there and moved in with my girlfriend to keep my parents in Iowa safe. Like everyone else in Rock Island’s grocery stores and on its city sidewalks, I wore a surgical mask wherever I went. As fall arrived, I applied for the Census job and for the first time in months found myself spending time in Iowa again. There, I found a very different world than the one I’d been living in across the river—one that almost made me question the pandemic reality.

One morning in September, I put on my mask and drove through a drive-through chain in Rock Island to buy an iced coffee from a masked barista. No shops were yet open for inside dining. An hour later, Census messenger bag at my side and clipboard in hand, I realized I was the only one with my face covered in a crowded Iowa bar. A man at the counter joked “Oh no, the Census is here for us,” prompting widespread laughter. “You don’t have to wear that on our account, hun,” the bar’s owner told me when I started reading the questionnaire to her. I had gotten used to variations on the “take that mask off, you have to be too hot wearing that,” (which was actually a common complaint about masks back in 1918 too) greeting many times by now, and had a prepared response about government policy at the ready. The judgmental eyes and reverse mask-shaming was hard to resist—I was glad to have my “government employee” excuse as a sort of apology. The longer I was there, wearing a mask in that bar did start feeling sort of silly—surrounded by happy, healthy looking people, it was hard to remember a deadly pandemic was still raging. My mask, I think, was an uncomfortable reminder for them.

A statewide mask mandate was now actually—finally—in effect, but you wouldn’t know it looking around that bar. Governor Reynold’s mandate had exceptions galore—no need to mask if you can maintain six feet of distance, or you’re eating in a restaurant, or attending a religious gathering, or have a “medical condition.” Here, where the sides of several barns down the street featured hand painted “Trump 2020” murals, residents were already primed by their political affiliations to disregard the pandemic—the governor’s halfhearted mandates were too little, too late.

Across the county, masks had become yet another facet of identity politics—an identifier for whether you’d attended college or were a Democrat or Republican. I’d become pretty adept at impression management as a liberal in Iowa. I knew how to fly under the radar in particularly red areas. When enumerating Trump houses (always very clearly identifiable by their devotion to yard signs), I could hide the fact that I’d attended our local hub of “liberal indoctrination” (the liberal arts college), but my mask was an instant stigma marker—my politics were spread clearly all over my face. 

We know the reasons for spurning masks are multifold and complicated. On a personal level, politics play a big role, of course—Republicans see masks as another way “elite” experts are trying to infringe on their freedoms, while Democrats see wearing them as a moral imperative, a sacrifice for the health of the greater good. In Scott County, Iowa, 50.7% of registered voters are Democrats. In Rock Island, Illinois, across the river, 54.8% are. Like in many public health crises, gender plays a role too—masks are “a sign of weakness” to some men. Religion can also be a factor. Though early national public-health messaging about mask wearing was mixed and unclear, Illinois locked down fast and made it clear the pandemic was a serious crisis. It seems clear to me, as someone living in a masking borderlands, that top-down mask regulations, laws, and government messaging can play a significant role in changing attitudes and culture quickly. I struggled at first to conform in Illinois—it was hard to remember a mask when leaving the house. But there was intense social pressure to remember. In Iowa, there was never a new social norm to adapt to.

Now that many Americans are fully vaccinated, the CDC has loosened guidelines—only requiring masks on public transportation and telling vaccinated Americans they can “resume normal activities” unmasked. Local businesses have followed these new rules in both Iowa and Illinois, and I’m starting to see fewer people wearing masks in grocery stores and coffee shops. The changes, though, just add more ambiguity—Americans will have to trust the unmasked people they meet are being honest about their vaccination status.

Christian Elliott

Christian is a journalism graduate student at Northwestern University. He received his Bachelor of Arts in cultural anthropology and environmental studies from Augustana College, a small liberal arts school in Rock Island, Illinois, in 2020. He enjoys bringing together anthropological research/theory and personal experience to tell true (written and audio) stories and understand our complicated, globalized world a little better. You can reach Christian on Twitter @csbelliott.

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Photo credit: Lehi Sanchez (APTNNEWS.CA)

UPDATED 5/6/2021

Today, May 5, 2021, people across the United States will wear red in recognition of missing and/or murdered American Indian (Indigenous) women. They will type #MMIW, #MMIWG or something similar in their social media feeds. If they are one of a few American Indians in their organizations, they may be asked (a bit ironically) to make special statements about missing American Indian peoples.

Why does “MMIW” exist? Recently, the skeleton of a Turtle Mountain Chippewa woman was found in a storage unit in Durham, North Carolina … 15 years after she went missing. All over North America, each week, murdered American Indian women are found in bushes, abandoned houses and trashcans. In 2017, in the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, the disintegrating bodies of three women were found dumped on the same block within about 45 days. The many cases of American Indian disappearance and murder around North America highlight the fact that, in the United States, American Indian bodies remain disposable and invisible (not just disposable).

Campaigns like “MMIW” attempt to push against social, economic and political processes within which American Indian absence is simply accepted. This is tricky intellectual territory. American Indian peoples are present, but our presences tend to exist in very specific ways. To be American Indian is to carry a wardrobe with you that signifies genetic and cultural authenticity. This wardrobe might be as grand as traditional Indian regalia sewn with beads, shells and/or metal pieces (jingles). It might be as simple as a turquoise pendant worn on the lapel of a Ralph Lauren suit. Over the last decade, graduates of colleges and high schools have fought to place an eagle feather on top of standard, institutionalized graduation wardrobes.

However, there is a reckoning of wardrobe that is taking place in the age of MMIW. An increasingly popular act across Indian Country is to take a red-painted hand and cover your mouth in various social settings. This red hand over the mouth represents blood and silence – shed blood of American Indians which ought not to be normal, and the pervasive silences that American Indians die within and attempt to speak through. Several news articles have been written about the practice. What these stories tend to hilight is the fact that American Indian peoples are asking to be seen even as we are finding ways to step out of (or completely abandon) colonial expectations of how we ought to appear.

This has a lot to do with race. Years ago, I wrote an article about racial seeing in the Lumbee Tribe. Among other things, I made a distinction between Indian race as “blood” and Indian race as “phenotype”. In most political conversations in Indian Country, race as a blood-quantum concept is more important than race as a matter of how our bodies are shaped or how our bodies look. In my article, I made a very specific point that we (American Indians) are often not allowed to talk about how we look and how our composition (our physical substance) means a lot to the communities we are from.

A famous Lumbee folk singer, Willie Lowery, in the 1970s, composed a song titled “Brown Skin”. It was an ode to American Indian presence in a Black-White U.S. South. It was also permission to appreciate unique characteristics of Lumbee embodiment. My students often laugh when I tell them that many Lumbees say: “No baby smells like a Lumbee baby”.

Back around 2014, while teaching medical students in Chicago, I often made the case that American Indian physicians are needed because Indian people experience Indian bodies unlike other people. Part of being in medicine is being in close contact with a human being – feeling the vibrations of their body, smelling, and listening. A physician can affirm the presence of your body within the clinical space (which is the substance of good medicine) or they can abandon your body within the clinical space (which is the substance of medical harm). Diversity in medicine is about placing the right people in the clinical space to affirm bodily presences.

On that note, abandoning and disappearing (the actions that cause “MMIW”) don’t have to be murder and burial in a wretched place. They can exist in casual, seemingly innocent interactions. I recently spoke with a colleague who reminded me of the racial contexts of my being in the academy. He once heard another faculty member state that I didn’t “look Indian”. I asked him (my colleague) why he didn’t tell me what he heard when he first heard. He stated that it was tough because, on one hand, he thought that I couldn’t take the news. He thought I would be hurt. On the other hand, he didn’t know if it was ethical to make me more visible – to point out how I actually look: “David, I knew that in their eyes you would never look Indian enough, no one could be.”

My wife’s grandfather, Grandpa Ray, watched a lot of Western movies before his death in 2012.  When I was around the Lumbee community, I would sometimes join him in his living room, and we would laugh at portrayals of Indians by White actors such as Burt Lancaster in “Apache”. One day, Grandpa Ray looked over at me and said: “You know that is a White man, right?” I automatically replied: “Of course.” He laughed. “Let me tell you something; It is easy for us to tell that that is a White man playing us. But it isn’t easy for them (White people) to tell that we are Indians playing them.”

This was an eye-opening conversation. Grandpa Ray wasn’t attempting to describe how American Indians really look. He also wasn’t saying that we (American Indians) attempt to be White. No, he was making an assertion that we (all Americans) are trained to see Whiteness, and that decades (or centuries) of our being taught to see, respect and possibly fear Whiteness made it almost impossible to hide Whiteness under brown/red paint. The power of ‘red face’ (Indians being played by non-Indian people) was that you can never put on enough paint and fake hair to look Indian. At the same time, we (American Indians) always attempt to make ourselves seen in response to ‘red face’. American Indian people often change our behaviors (our gestures, our mannerisms, our ways of being in the world) for non-Indians to catch a glimpse of us.

My point here is that, in a world of racial cosplay, American Indians are constantly defaced and disembodied.

The transformation of Indianess into a disembodied reality – into a costume to be worn – began during the emergence of military operations in the United States. In elementary school, you may have learned about the Boston Tea Party of 1773. However, I doubt that your teacher was prepared to explain why White politicians dressed in brown paint and feathers as part of their participation in this critical colonial event.

By the 1800s, during the Civil War, the famous outlaw Jesse James disguised himself as my grandfather, Henry Berry Lowry, during a bank heist. His theory was that my grandfather had become so infamous (he had a bounty on his head larger than Jesse James) that no one would follow after them if they disguised themselves as my grandfather’s gang. During World War 2, the US military used American Indians as decoys (in addition to using Indian languages within “code talking”) during assaults on islands in the Pacific. By the Vietnam War, planes and tanks were named after American Indian communities and persons.

Placement of American Indians as a skin on top of the American colonial project mirrors an equally powerful intellectual project within the United States to re-racialize America within Black-White, immigrant-citizen dichotomies. Recently, sociologist Nancy Yuen, when asked about the roots of Whites portraying Asians in Hollywood, stated that this practice came out of minstrelsy (White people playing Black people). I disagree. White portrayal of non-White people was first and foremost based in White portrayals of American Indians from the mid-1700s to today.

Meanwhile, American Indians are defaced. For example, our bodies are easily confused for Puerto Rican, Italian, South Asian, Colombian or Asian bodies. We look like everything and nothing, simultaneously. When Deb Haaland was announced as the Secretary of the Department of Interior, my friend who lived in India part of his childhood stated in humor: “As long as she keeps turquoise necklaces on and not gold, we will remember that she is the other Indian”.

The defacement of American Indians – our identities being attached to cultural realities rather than to a physiologically recognizable self – is becoming especially problematic in an age of artificial intelligence and facial, biometric security. When I was at MIT directly after 9/11, my wife (then girlfriend) warned me to shave “appropriately” before I went to Boston’s airport. Her fear was that newly improvised security (there were rumors back then that the FBI used facial recognition) might have seen me as a potential Arab threat. In 2020, in the midst of COVID19 and tumultuous conversations about racial recognition and artificial intelligence, MIT’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences published a series of discussions by faculty who spoke from the conditions of their research about the meaning of masks. I was quickly reminded that MIT didn’t have American Indian faculty present to critique or offer insight within MIT’s academic debates about artificial intelligence. American Indians were not present as scholars or subjects of AI scholarship. There were no concerns for how or when American Indians were written into software codes. The recent removal of the R-word mascot seemed to end any chance of American Indians being facially recognized.

At that same moment, I was regularly present on social media asking for anyone and everyone to pay attention to Major League and National Football League teams who manufactured and sold face masks adorned with American Indian mascots. In the Lumbee Tribe (my home community) teachers in the local school system notified me that Black teachers wore masks with the R-word mascot. “They don’t care,” one Lumbee teacher told me, “it is like they know we can’t say anything about their masks because (their masks) are for health and safety. One of them (a Black teacher) even had a Black Lives Matter shirt on with an (Indian) mask.”

Image: During the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, online shops like etsy.com have become central hubs for the circulation of face masks featuring American Indian mascots. I tend to call them “red masks” because of their over celebration of American Indian caricature, genocide and marginalization. 

This is an especially important conversation in the midst of emerging policy changes across the United States that seem solely focused on relationships of the American police-state to Black bodies. As “Black Lives Matter” and similar frameworks of racial testimony help frame journalist accounts, academic awards and other streams of influence, and as George Floyd and other Black victims of police shootings become the faces of racial justice in America, we are pushed to forget that the American Indian Movement (AIM) began in Minneapolis as a response to police violence directed toward American Indian bodies.

The emerging devotion of Americans storytellers to Black-White politics is affecting conversations that, just ten years ago, would have placed American Indians at the center. The Guardian and other newspapers recently published accounts of a controversy that has been brewing at Princeton University over the use of “bones of Black children” to teach anthropology. Upon first reading Guardian’s article, I shouted:

How, in an article about the role of anthropology in the use of bones from murdered children, do you not mention the fact that the bones of murdered American Indian children established the discipline of anthropology?

I was once again reminded that American Indian death is not prioritized within institutions of social justice. As we have seen with countless videos of Black men shot by police over the last few years, Black deaths are hyper-visualized. American Indian deaths are not.

In the meantime, American Indian bones have been moved from evidence of a crime (colonialism and genocide) to a symbol of entrepreneurship and social movement. There are many stories of all-White fraternities at Yale and other places that used Indian skulls for ceremonies. More recently, as fashion entrepreneurs have selected symbols to represent their work, Indian skulls have become aesthetically pleasing medallions worn by American consumers. This over-representation of Indian death and disfigurement on clothing parallels under-representation of Indian identity and perspective in the clothing/fashion industry.

During one of my recent exchanges on Twitter about Indian mascots, a White man from Tennessee interjected:

Don’t you realize by getting rid of references to Native American culture (i.e. Indian mascots on sports uniforms), you are the one advocating for genocide. In fact the final genocide where they are no longer even talked about in society

I quickly responded:

You sound like a drug trafficker suggesting that the end of drug dealing will be the end of the American economy. You sound like the head of the KKK suggesting that the end of his organization will be the end of community service.

We cannot allow American Indian bodies to be transformed into a fossilized fuel for the colonial project. As we put away our masks – which we have worn faithfully over the last year of pandemic – we cannot forget what they have taught us about mattering in America…we cannot forget what they have taught us about what we wear and how we are worn.

David Shane Lowry

David Shane Lowry, a member of the Lumbee Tribe, is the Distinguished Fellow in Native American Studies at MIT. In this role, David is leading a new conversation at MIT about the responsibilities of MIT (and science/technology education, more generally) in the theft of American Indian land and the dismantling of American Indian health and community. Since 2013, David has lectured across the United States – roles in which he has become well versed in conversations at the intersection of race, (health) science & popular culture. His first book, titled Lumbee Pipelines (under contract with University of Nebraska Press), explores American Indian utilization of colonial conditions to create opportunities that are both uplifting and oppressive. His second book, titled Black Jesus, is an ethnography of Michael Jordan. It began when David realized that he and Jordan shared the same anthropology advisor at UNC … 23 years apart.

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Before 2020 and COVID-19, I never thought much about masks. Now I think about them all the time. One question that keeps coming up is why they have become so controversial and contentious, especially here in the US. Why all the resistance? These questions are on my mind constantly. The whole subject of mask-wearing is often so tense that it can be difficult to even mention the subject. Masks have become a proxy for not only what people believe about COVID-19, but also other issues such as ideas about freedom and liberty, individualism vs. collectivism, the role of science in society, and government power.

All that in a little mask.

So how can we understand all the mask resistance? How can we break through some of the tension, conflict, and mistrust? In anthropology, we tend to approach these kinds of issues through long-term ethnographic research. Spend time with people, listen to them, try to see where they are coming from. The basic idea is to try to “meet people where they are” in order to understand the world through their eyes (see Fiske 2016 on this argument in relation to climate change skepticism).[i] This kind of work is not easy, especially with highly contentious issues.

Last summer I saw one good example of an attempt to “meet people where they are,” but it wasn’t the work of any anthropologists. It was this video by two guys (Chad Kroeger and JT Parr from the Going Deep podcast) who did some comical outreach about masks in Huntington Beach. If you have been following the ups and downs of that beachside community over the past year, you know that Chad and JT didn’t choose the easiest site for community outreach.

In the video, people’s reactions are all over the place: One woman says she doesn’t wear a mask because she thinks they are a health risk. One man said people don’t need to wear masks because “saltwater kills that shit.” Another guy on a bike says he’s not pro-mask because “it’s all fake, dude, come on!” And yet another blows off the idea that wearing a mask could help us open back up sooner, saying that’s just “a talking point on the TV bro.” In the video, one man calls Coronavirus a “bullshit lie” and throws around some profanity. And then, at the end of the video, there’s the guy who says that Chad and JT can’t tell him what his rights are, that he doesn’t believe in wearing masks, and ends with: “if you want some of me come on and get this.”

Not everyone gets angry or completely dismisses the idea of wearing a mask, however. Some are willing to at least talk to Chad and JT. Two young guys even accept a couple masks and swear on “Tyler, the Creator” to actually wear them. Chad and JT offer masks to two young women, who say no thanks, they already have some. So why aren’t they wearing them, Chad and JT ask. One of the women says it’s because they left them in their car. “Oh, ok, that makes sense,” responds Chad.

I have to hand it to these two guys. They have a pretty good ground game. Chad and JT do an incredible job maintaining their cool in the face of some serious hostility. The video is both humorous and troubling all at once. The piece highlights a wide range of responses to masks, from the negligent and ambivalent to the violent. I think their approach shows some of the benefits of trying to spend time on the ground and gain a better understanding of where people are coming from–including the reasons why some people are resistant.

I have made some of my own observations the past year as well. This wasn’t part of any formal research, just some of what I have seen in day-to-day life. I just moved back to the California coast, which means that I have been able to get down to the beach more often again. It’s been nice to get outside after months and months of shelter-in-place, although life is a lot different than it was in the pre-COVID days. Beach trips now mean thinking about masks, crowds, social distancing, and which places are safer to go than others. It feels a bit like trying to run a gauntlet.

There’s one detail that I noticed about mask wearing though. It seemed like most people were not wearing masks at the beach. And I mean right down on the beach or walking along it via sidewalks and boardwalks. There was noticeably less compliance. I did a few informal counts and the rates were around 20-25% of people actually wearing masks.[ii]

But in the commercial areas right near the beach, things were very different. Most people were wearing masks, and it didn’t seem to be a big issue. They just did it. People may not have liked the requirements, but they went along with them. And for the most part, things seemed to be working ok. But down at the beach…it was a completely different story. So what’s going on here?

I think a lot of it comes down to ambiguity. In short, what I noticed is that the rules and expectations were pretty clearly laid out in the commercial zones. Each store or business put up a sign and explained what they expected before people walked in the door. And it worked. People complied for the most part. But the beach was a completely different scenario. While there were rules and pronouncements at the city and county level, it was actually pretty unclear what, exactly, people could and could not be doing when they were on the beach. There were few if any clear posted signs, and essentially no enforcement. While people knew about mask and social distancing mandates, it was not completely clear how they applied to the beach. It was a bit of a free-for-all.

So people improvised and did what they thought made sense…or just what they wanted to do. Some were defiant, others were practical. Surfers, for example, generally were not wearing masks…because they were in wetsuits and heading into the water. It didn’t make much sense to wear a mask on the way to jumping in the water. Overall, the situation at the beach was pretty haphazard. At times it seemed to work OK and people kept their distance and went about their business. At other times, however, it left a lot of room for stress, tension, and worse.

One of the lessons here is that ambiguity can easily breed confusion and conflict. And I think that’s a key problem. But the issue is not solely about ambiguity and the presence or absence of rules. As Elinor Ostrom and others have demonstrated, it depends on who creates, implements, and enforces those rules. There were mask mandates at the city and county level,  so they were essentially imposed top-down. But I think more people were willing to comply in commercial zones here in my coastal neighborhood, for example, because the rules were clear and perhaps because they were implemented by local users (business owners). It wasn’t as if there were city or state officials there implementing and enforcing those rules–it was up to the business owners and employees themselves. This is my running hypothesis, at least. Yes, there were instances of conflict and even protests over the mask mandates around town, but for the most part they seemed to work fairly well.

But again, down at the beach things were very different. Even so, there wasn’t exactly a lot of overt conflict. It was more a matter of confusion and ambiguity, which just added to the overall stress and anxiety of daily pandemic life. I do think that clear rules and guidelines at the beach would have helped, but one of the big challenges was actually a matter of who, exactly, should or could implement and enforce them. Much of my argument here comes from my work on the politics of conservation, particularly local resistance to and compliance with conservation projects. If people aren’t part of the process, it’s not surprising that they resist. But, it’s not as simple as just “getting the community on board” and expecting everything to work out.

Still, when it comes to the case at hand, that missing ingredient–the community of users who could actually implement and enforce rules–was something I have thought about a lot in the past year. I often wondered why there weren’t any attempts to involve communities, rather than just imposing rules and regulations and hoping for the best. Maybe there were such attempts, but I didn’t see or hear about them. It’s not an easy situation, but I think that community-based organizations could have helped quite a lot, especially if they were involved in a meaningful way. That, I think, would be a big step forward for ameliorating some of the ongoing tensions and conflicts between the masked and the unmasked. Perhaps there’s a lesson here for whatever comes next.

-RA

[i] Fiske, S.J., 2016. “Climate scepticism” inside the Beltway and across the Bay. Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations, pp.319-335.

[ii] This is not a proper representative sample, but just based upon a few instances and the general observation about less compliance. Overall, I think the observation holds, but I’d like to see some formal research on it.

Ryan

Ryan Anderson is a cultural and environmental anthropologist.

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The group blog, guavanthropology.tw is a vibrant space for anthropological discussion and often takes on important social issues. Aimed at a broad Mandarin language reading audience, it may unfamiliar to most readers of anthrodendum—but a few authors have contributed to both group blogs.

In “I Suddenly Thought of Your Face,” Bricoleur engages in a kind of meta-commentary, bringing together several discussions of face masks, faciality, and anonymous yet intimately felt connections to publics to encourage readers to consider how a simple technology for halting the spread of a virus might pose wider questions. Whether we think of wearing masks as a necessary caution, a species of magical thinking, or an extension of biopolitical modes of control, “I Suddenly Thought of Your Face” provokes us to think about what we mean when we suddenly—or not so suddenly—think of someone’s face during the Covid crisis.]

Today I’d like to post something very brief about “the face.” My title alludes to a novel by Hong Kong writer Huang Bik-wan; however, I do not plan on discussing her book. Neither will I discuss what Levinas has called “the face of the Other” nor Delueze and Guattari’s notion of faciality. Rather, I want to discuss the face under a protective mask.

In March, Covid-19 began to spread in the United States. From the East to the West Coast, in the North and in the South, colleges and universities one after the other stopped holding face-to-face classes and moved to remote instruction. Students left their campuses. Meanwhile, Taiwan loosened restrictions on mailing protective face masks abroad. I suddenly thought of sending a few cloth face masks to friends in the US.

One of these friends wrote back, saying, “Over here very few people wear masks.” Naturally, one reason was that toilet paper, medical masks, rubbing alcohol, and hand sanitizer had already been snatched up by hoarders. Still, for the most part Americans felt that masks were either for medical personnel or the sick to wear. Another friend said that even though few people wore masks, the more they looked at reports concerning the pandemic, the more they thought that it might be necessary to wear one. A third friend’s response was more curious. They said that they had found industrial masks in their garage and would wear them as needed.

I couldn’t help wondering: was the industrial mask part of a Halloween costume of some years ago?

Because I didn’t have a sense of what “industrial masks” were, I looked up an image online. They ranged from masks shaped like safety helmets to something worn by Bane in the Batman movies. I thought that regardless my friends could use the masks, so I went ahead with my plan and sent a few to them. Fortunately, one could still readily buy masks in Taiwan.

My friends in the US had a point.

When the situation in the US was not yet serious, the Surgeon General requested that people not wear masks: masks had little use for most people to prevent infection, he said, and should be retained for medical personnel who needed them. The American CDC stressed handwashing and social distancing, as well as avoiding large assemblies of people. Neither recommended wearing masks.

A recent article in the Atlantic on face masks contained the following remarks on mask wearing:

“In the West, I think we need to overcome—I wouldn’t call it a fear of the mask, but [the] stigma with a mask,” Christos Lynteris, a medical anthropologist at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland, told me. “I’ve heard people say, ‘I was carrying a mask in the airplane but I was too ashamed to wear it.’ Where does this shame come from? Is it because people will think you are a wimp? Because people will think you are ill?”

If you wear a mask in a British supermarket, “people react strangely,” for a number of possible reasons: the association with East Asian countries, a suspicion that you’re using something that others are more in need of, a concern that you’re wearing it because you’re ill and shouldn’t be there, a conviction that you’re “unnecessarily spreading panic.”

For Asians and Asian Americans living in the United States, wearing a mask might invite attacks or dirty looks from people on the street. Ever since SARS, Americans have connected masks to Chinese and Southeast Asian people. Perhaps it is a function of xenophobia. Masks connect to demonization of “China being the source of contagious diseases, and Chinese people spreading them.”

Lest we forget, many countries have laws that forbid covering the face—laws that stipulate one cannot do anything that will obstruct facial recognition in demonstrations, public assemblies, and public places. Countries that have such laws forbidding masks are more numerous than we at first imagine.

Recently, however, the Trump administration has changed its attitude from refusing masks to taking a “wait and see” approach. The WHO, the US, and the EU have all started to accept masks. But the cultural connotations of masks have not changed. Masks represent Otherness, collectivity, sharing in public weal and woe. They may even be a symbol of Chinese modernity.

As another person for the interview mentioned above noted, “In Hong Kong today, if you do not wear a mask in public, you will be stigmatized and treated with discrimination, not only because people will fear that you are an asymptomatic carrier of the virus, but also because you have not taken on the ethical duties of citizenship.”

These reports might have some truth, but they seem not to have noticed that in Hong Kong last year’s anti-mask law led to an enormous political disturbance. Although the conditions of the pandemic have shifted the politics of mask wearing considerably, the controversy surrounding the constitutionality of the anti-mask law is still unfolding. We should also not forget that even in late January, with the Covid-19 crisis emerging, the Hong Kong government maintained many restrictions on face masks.

How might we understand these controversies about masks, even in mask friendly countries like Hong Kong?

The mask is a sign with a close correspondence with the face, itself an index for identity, identifiability, expression, individuality, and otherness. Behind the face is a world, an “entire history.” Chao En-chieh has written on this topic in a blog series on Covid-19 appearing on Discover Society, in which she discusses the subjective symbolism of the face in relationship to masks:

For a while, many Western authors explained to the world that the weird habit of wearing surgical masks in Asia was a manifestation of a cultural norm of solidarity. Their assumption was since it couldn’t be scientific, it had to be cultural. The standard “scientific West, cultural rest” scenario. Mask wearing has been presented over and over again as a false but “symbolically valuable” “myth” that comforts poor, conformist Asians, until very recently.

The truth is that the West is just as cultural as the Rest. There has been a kind of face-centrist self-formation, where the face is the “natural symbol” (Douglas 1967) of the liberal subject. A deeply entrenched fetishism about the face, a kind of semiotic ideology that celebrates exposed faces and resents the face-covering images associated with “oppressed” Muslim women. With the mask on you are a lesser you (or a greater you, if you are Batman). Either way, the mask transforms the person into someone else

Face masks could be the center of many kinds of research. We might also bring up surgical mask diplomacy, the political economy of surgical masks, or the global supply chain of surgical masks….

The virus presses in on society’s weaknesses, just as it attacks places of weakest resistance in the body, causing each polity to tighten at the borders of its sovereignty, “trying to call the world to a stop through a kind of force that nothing else could exert.” It has attacked medical systems, eldercare, social gatherings, mobility and travel, the global economic system, all at the cost of human lives.

In its treatment of the pandemic, political power tends to treat human lives as individual units of accounting, expressions in each day’s rolling figure of infections and deaths. Thus, the epidemic is both distant (an abstract set of statistics) and intimate (a formless danger right beside you). Nonetheless, neither biopolitics nor necropolitics can easily comprehend the epidemic or the break in everydayness that has followed in the epidemic’s wake. Here in Taiwan, on the margins of empire, we can see that wherever the virus has gone, the effects that stand out have been disparate, different in Italy, Spain, the United States, England, France, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Turkey, Iran….

We can observe these differences in intellectual commentary. French philosopher Nancy points out, the virus has changed the conditions of our existence, “communizing us.” Arundhati has even claimed that the pandemic is a “portal” or “gateway” through which we are entering a new world: the epidemic has forced us to reimagine what the world will be like once the pandemic ends.

Even as I respect these authors, from the vantage of Taiwan, I find this kind of imagination a bit too optimistic. Yet, as Taiwanese people often say, we do not have the right to be pessimistic.

Face masks are a type of protective gear, representing safety, protection, and resistance. They are a symbolic medium that covers individual characteristics (even as customization lets surgical masks also express one’s individuality), erasing what makes one identifiable. In the face of increasingly oppressive regimes, the mask anonymizes activists. Under its unifying sign, activists create spaces of freedom and resistance, particularly in countries employing facial recognition systems. I prefer to have the freedom to hide my identity. To rulers, the mask represents a blockage, something that obscures transparency and surveillance. But to those who resist, this blockage is a limited kind of safety.

I don’t have a daily lineup of face masks as some of my friends do; but as someone with allergies, I have a fondness for masks and keep more than a few around. As a result, I remained calm throughout the mask famine of a little while ago. As a result, I might have missed out on something. A friend who keeps a running count of her face masks brought to my attention an experience of “epidemic community” that she describes as follows:

The masks that my neighborhood pharmacy has distributed recently have all been leopard print masks. Thus when I go to the market or out to buy noodles at a streetside stand, I will always brush shoulders with a granny wearing a fashionable leopard print mask. The epidemic has mixed things up so that this small city with many retired people has become on trend. I think of this as the result of the relationship between the epidemic and an imagined community. Imagined communities cause mutual enmity and love. The epidemic has caused us to be distant from each other but has also brought us closer. The ‘epidemic community’ causes people to discover their similarities, but also to discover their differences.

My friend described this sense of intimacy as “knowing that we are all comrades in arms” (actually, I think it should be in distress!). She also reminded me that “even as the epidemic separated us from each other, it actually joined us anew. Or we could say that it reconfirmed that not only are we who live in this small city closely related to each other, we are also related to the world—and much more than we imagined previously. Didn’t you mail masks to your friends in the United States? If it weren’t for the epidemic, you might not have thought of them.”

I laughed and said, “I think of them often. I wonder if they miss me very much, though.” Perhaps the masks will be the medium of our imagined togetherness, while separated by the virus.

*Note: The links and images were added by the translator, DJ Hatfield

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