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Indian Summer, Sleepy Lagoon, & Listening When Folks Say "Hey..."
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onAlright, my little windfall peaches, let's talk about Indian Summer. I mentioned during the Weenie launch madness that this would be the last year I will be offering that PBSW OG blend, & here's the skinny:
On a practical level, I am at the bottom of the bottle of my favorite, long-discontinued blackberry single note, & have yet to find a replacement that makes me remotely happy. On a more important level, though, some of you have reached out about the name itself, & it's my responsibility as a creator to listen & adjust.
Every one of us carries nostalgic, romantic, deeply emotional connections to words, terms, names, & phrases. Part of a shared culture is the joint understanding of a fragment of language as conveying so much more than its literal meaning. This is social shorthand, & I lean on it a lot in my scent names & descriptions to transport you into the worlds I've created in my mind. It is powerful & delicious & a key part of the magic.
But our shared culture isn't the only culture, & it's certainly not the trump card in a non existent game of who-gets-to-say.
When I'm doing scent development, I make a point of doing some creative Googling to see what associations surface in connection with my going concepts. I'm looking for several red flags: the potential to step on another indie maker's existing work; copyright constraints & Big Beauty affiliation; & any obvious connections to fascism, racism, bigotry, or related bullshit. I also look deeper, for more nuanced concerns of exoticism, imperialism, appropriation, & other Why-Are-White-People shenanigans. Writing it out looks pretty daunting, but while it's definitely work, it's not difficult to take a moment to do some cultural vetting before I release a new scent.
Even with this work, I sometimes miss a critical association when researching a blend for launch; Sleepy Lagoon is a prime example, & I am grateful to the PBSW community for alerting me to the term's weighted and deadly meaning to the Latinx community in Los Angeles.
But sometimes, blends have been part of the PBSW wallpaper for so long, I don't see them through a critical lens, & I miss a really blatant & obvious offense.
The term Indian summer is so deep in my Anglophile vernacular, & conjures such vivid and welcome associations, that I have worked with it in my catalog for over a decade without seeing it for what it arguably is: an offensive term rooted in anti-Native American racism. It is the season that gives way to cooler temperatures, only to take it back, like the "untrustworthy Indian" stereotype that pervades both outdated frontier American narratives & modern policy discourse on Native tribal sovereignty.
I am deeply thankful to the PBSW fans who called me to task on perpetuating this slur, for their work to demonstrate the harm done by this & similar terms, & for their confidence in my ability to see & correct my mistake. And I'm thankful for you, for reading this & for taking a moment to consider how anti-Native American bias & appropriation exists and thrives in white spaces, particularly in the creative & witchcraft/occult/New Age communities, & how we can work to dismantle it.
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