As many of you I have been really concerned about the situation in North Dakota, where once again in an all too common script, the Rights of the Indigenous People are being ignored in favor of the greed of a dying industry. I was incensed by the images of police in riot gear facing the peaceful prayers of the rightful owners of the land. The Peace Treaties signed by US officials in 1851 seem to be worth less than toilet papers nowadays.
I did my little part to support them with a donation, but with the Holiday season coming up I was thinking to help spread the message and help funding them even more by buying a bunch of NO DAPL, Water Is Life t-shirts for gifts.
I have always loved ethnic art and Native Americans’s culture has been one of my interests since I was 12 and some of these Standing Rock shirts have pretty cool designs. Not to mention the fact that I keep seeing Bernie Sanders picture holding one of these shirts.
I want to buy an official Standing Rock shirt, but I want to make sure that even that little money I spend can go to help the Water Protectors. I am also jaded about web, and in the general the unscrupulous greed of people that hides behind the anonymity of the web, so I asked a few sites :”How can I be sure some money from the sale of these t-shirts are actually going to the Sacred Stone Standing Rock camps?”, well I waited a few days and nobody from, for example, TeeChip, where a few sellers use the Bernie Sanders photo to promote their merchandise, answered.
Yes, TeeChip states that part of the proceedings go to a cause but there is no transparent accountability of the shirts sold or the money funded to the cause. I did a quick web search and one of the first results was Pricejabber, a reviews site, where they confirm Teechip’s awful reputation.
Updated: Another one on the same style is Teezily.com, they also have a long list of complaints and their sellers do not support any Native American cause.
That’s why I decided to do a little web search on this Standing Rock shirts business. The search confirmed that:
- they are selling like hot potatoes and there are tens of different styles and sellers all over the web. Even a guy from Ukraine is selling them on RedBubble for almost $ 30 (+shipping) a pop.
Google pulled up more than 1M results for Standing Rock tshirt, 141,000 results for NODAPL shirts, even on Amazon you can buy your “Water is Life” tshirt.
2. None of these sellers is paying a dime to the Standing Rock camp or to the NODAPL.
Some got really carried away by with creativity on the Native American theme.
Some are really clear ripoffs
These in particular are rogue sellers that are advertising heavily on Facebook & Instagram:
Native American
Native American Indians
Native American Cultures
Native American World
Support Native Americans
Native Americans Today
Native American Church
PLEASE REPORT THOSE PAGES TO FACEBOOK (click “More” under the profile and you will see the Report link) so they will shut them down.
Basically every time you see the generic words “Native American” in their name and some stereotyped Native American imagery or various celebrities faces photo-edited on top of the body wearing one of their t-shirts you can be fairly sure it is one of those scammers.
THE ONLY ONE that offers some kind of accountability and transparency is the original campaign by Shailene Woodley on Omaze.com. It’s the only official Standing Rock shirt, but even here please be aware that it will actually fund the Up to Us Foundation which, among other things, is working for the fight against the North Dakota Pipeline, but it is not funding the Standing Rock Sioux tribe or the Sacred Stone camp.
UPDATE 2/18/2017: More sloppy & stupid scammers
Unfortunately the Water Protectors are in the news again as the DAPL has been allowed to continue construction and the requests of the Lakota People totally ignored.
This means that the t-shirt pirates are active again, greedy for the bucks of well meaning supporters.
Here is the latest scam, it starts from this ad on Google Search, where this site claims to be nonprofit.
When you get to their site you can see they just sell quickly designed prints that have really nothing to do with traditional native American design and patterns if not a vague superficial resemblance. In that still doesn’t set off alarm bells in your mind check the final link at the bottom of the page …
See they even claim to be part of an “Indigenous Culture Instutute” and if you click on that you just go a generic Shopify page… sloppy and stupid.