How Indigenous Culture Is Appropriated When People Declare Their ‘Spirit Animals’

With a simple Google search of the term “spirit animal,” people everywhere can participate in the pop culture phenomenon that is choosing an animal, TV character or even a drink at Starbucks that is representative of themselves. The craze focuses on singling out something that might resonate with a person’s personality or identity that they’d like to take on. But for the Indigenous peoples who were raised with a distinctly different cultural understanding of a spirit animal, its role within a tribe and even the way that it inhabits an environment, the many online quizzes, explainers and Urban Dictionary definitions available to the general population are less fun than they are offensive.

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