Native American Cultural Content

"Dianesims;c-17686683" wrote:
Well as the developers are working on representation and skintones, I hope they can add things for Native American/First Nations representation too. Like hairs for instance.

This gets complicated.

There are federal laws in place that make it illegal to use elements of recognized tribes if one is not an active tribal member - put in place as a result of extreme cases of appropriation. A few large corps have gotten away with violations because of their clout, so we have things like car brands named after tribes - but this is not legal.

So everything would have to be 'generic native' - which then brings up a whole other complication that's kind of obvious just from the wording there... knockoff stereotyping that is pretty much offensive by nature.

Non-specific elements like skintones and hair are pretty much already in game. The same tones that will work for a Chicano person, and the same hair that will work for an Asian person. Anyone who is not being done as a parody stereotype would be viable with those.

(Quite a few of my Asian townies have had noses that look very Native American. A slight adjustment to skintone and eye shape for some of them, and a change in name - and there you go for any modern person).

The moment you start adding things like feathers and ceremonial gowns and drums and dreamcatchers you have landed in the hot mess of cultural appropriation / misrepresentation / stereotyping. And if you name any of it, illegal issues of tribal sovereignty.

Some of the very comments in this thread noting things like Pocahontas and Casinos and such point to how this could all easily go wrong in extremely offensive ways that could actually land EA in court.


To do what's asked would most likely literally require multiple tribal governments signing off on licensing of their culture to a video game. The odds of that happening are low.