In 2014, musician Pharrell Williams wore a Native American headdress on the cover of Elle magazine. This was my first experience with Native American cultural appropriation, or cultural appropriation in general. In today’s society, it is much too easy to find someone, usually a white person, appropriating Native culture. While the appropriation of any culture in America is hypocritical and highly offensive, Philip J. Deloira’s “Playing Indian” focuses on the appropriation of Native Americans in particular. The history of the white man’s relationship with Native Americans is one we all know is deeply painful and destructive as it resulted in the genocide of a people and their culture. In the white man’s appropriation of their culture, the message being sent is of their lack of respect for Natives and their feeling of entitlement to use something meaningful for simple fashion or entertainment purposes. The history of this has been surprisingly long and gone unnoticed as it hid in one of the most famous stories of American patriotism preceding the Revolutionary War: the Boston Tea Party. In the story, which most American students are taught in school as young children, the colonists in Boston dress up as Native Americans to dump tea into the harbor and send a message to Britain about colonial rights. While we were enjoying the story and applauding the colonists for their bravery, the unsettling truth was blatant which was that the colonists held very little respect for their Native neighbors of the time. In 2018, our culture is more sensitive to the phenomenon and we can improve our own actions and the interpretation of these events in the past. The Boston Tea Party, and historical events like it, should now be taught with a sensitive lense, teaching the younger generations what the older ones were not: appropriation of Native culture is incredibly painful and insensitive.