Lewis Borck

The headline is the market. If you are going to use a misleading title to purposely draw in readers and educate them, the reality is that you are actually misinforming 60 percent of the people interacting with your story. So right from the start, you’re already doing more miseducation than education. It’s also probably a larger miseducation impact than this as well since the study only accounted for “shares” and not people who saw the post on social media and didn’t share it.

This damage doesn’t stop with miseducation. For example, take headlines relating to archaeology in the Americas. There is a culturally constructed emotional value attached to most words that forms a cognitive shortcut for how we think. For some words, this emotional value is pretty minimal. For others, it draws on powerful cultural constructs to create a strong response. As noted above, mystery is one such word that has this strong emotional response. Others, in the U.S. at least, include travel and exploration and discovery. These myths of discovery and exploration are particularly damaging because they paint a picture where Indigenous groups are not able caretakers of their own histories and landscapes. Headlines that promote this contribute to the erasure of modern Indigenous connections to landscapes by denying what descendant communities and researchers know, as well as what they are capable of knowing. This has huge implications for Indigenous management of their traditional lands. most U.S. citizens learn about modern Indigenous groups through the media and pop culture. So these sensational headlines disconnect Indigenous communities from their history in the public arena. This historical disconnection erases the presence of Indigenous groups from the public consciousness. According to a recent study by Reclaiming Native Truth, potentially 40 percent of the American population think that Native Americans no longer exist. This invisibility means that support for Indigenous struggles faces a steep uphill battle.

Many people feel that taking artifacts from archaeological sites, whether public or private, is fine. These views are intertwined with the overwhelming invisibility contemporary Native Americans have within popular and political American conversations.The editorial is built around a possible instance of cultural theft that occurred on an archaeological site located on private property in New Mexico. The supposed perpetrators were the cast and crew of the 2nd Maze Runner movie as reported during a televised interview with the movie's star, Dylan O'Brien.

"[Creepyting’s] paintings produced an entirely different message than what many of her supporters claimed when they linked her with urban street art. Nocket’s work, and the art of all vandals of national parks and other public spaces who come from privilege, is art with a message of entitlement—of mine, not yours, of me, not you. If street art is a form of activism against oppression, inverting those messages makes art that is a form of repression. It signals that control of social spaces—that power—belongs only to a select few."