So if rename the exercise something other than yoga we would be okay?
OH! Sure, the cultural imperialist steals the oppressed peoples signifiers and makes them their own! When will it ever stop! 
Simple: they wouldn’t believe that there’s the slightest connection between the first two sentences and the third. Just look at the Washington football team controversy.
Not that I can dispel it off the top of my head, but in threads like this, there seems to be a lot of assuming what people mean by X instead of trying to find out what they actually mean by X and, more importantly, why.
But ultimately the terms and focus of the activity will evolve. Whether or not the source culture likes the evolution (assuming you can find anyone entitled to speaking for an entire culture) is irrelevant.
Well the solution is obvious. Show those Canadians what it feel like when someone appropriates your culture.
Everybody get a moose, a hockey stick and ride around saying “Excuse me, excuse me,excuse me”
Does this mean we can make Italians give up their tomatoes now? 
Actually, the kind of yoga Westerners tend to dig - asana, i.e. posture yoga - isn’t exactly an ancient, purely Indian practice for spiritual growth.
Some of its roots is in Scandinavian gymnastics (!), of all things, and doesn’t stretch back much rather than the early 20th century. In Sweden, you had Pehr Henrik Ling, and in Denmark, Niels Bukh and I.P Müller, all of whom developed systems of gymnastic exercises to keep oneself healthy and fit. The Brits introduced these exercises to their armed forces; these, in turn, introduced them to the Indians. The Indians, in some cultural appropriation of their own, incorporated these exercises into yoga.
So without cultural appropriation - without a series of crude cultural borrowings, gross distortions, mistranslations, oversimplifications, wilful misunderstandings and outright thievery - yoga as we know it today wouldn’t even exist.
That is so Canadian :D.
Oh, speaking of Canadians getting miffed about cultural assimilation, ask a Canadian what they thought when the NHL tried to expand to Southern US cities ;).
No, the point is that what you mean doesn’t actually matter all that much. Is it considered acceptable to do blackface because you admire black people? No, because blackface is offensive.
So, too, is appropriating the headdress of American Indians. They have to work their entire lives to earn every single feather. You just put it on like a costume. You do it on Halloween, as a way to have fun. It’s trivializing something that is really important to them, no matter what your intentions.
If you truly admire them, why are you so completely ignoring their belief systems? Why are you not honoring their wishes and treating the headdress like a sacred object? Why are you unaware that it’s offensive to them and why?
And, no, that doesn’t apply to yoga. It’s just naive students trying to apply the rules they’ve learned without fully understanding them. Yoga wasn’t really appropriated. It was brought over by the very people who practiced it, not stolen from them by a colonial power. And, just like it has been adapted over centuries to different beliefs, it was adapted to a secular belief system.
Cultural appropriation is about stealing. It is about taking something that is important in one culture and trivializing it. It inherently involves a lack of respect. It doesn’t matter that you don’t mean to disrespect them–the action of turning something culturally significant into a costume is inherently offensive.
You want to show your admiration, take the headdress and go explain to people what it means. Put it in a museum. Don’t just wear it. Don’t go to a culture that has been historically oppressed by you and act as if you have the right to do whatever you want with their culture.
If you really honor them, you’ll treat them as equals. And then cultural artifacts will cross over naturally.
This is my understanding, too. Yoga is basically a European practice, with just enough “eastern” connection to give in a patina of ancient mysticism. As noted in this fine journalistic publication.
As for the UOttawa thing, I doubt the actual reasons the class was cancelled resemble the reasons being reported. People just love a “PC gone too far <shake fist>” story.
ETA: Has anyone seen anything written by a source other than the yoga teacher whose class got cancelled? She seems to be the only one talking.
UOttawa Long distance running club will be next. Don’t want to offend the Kenyans.
What if I choose to artificially darken my skin by using a sun bed or fake tan because I like the look of darker skin?
Cultural appropriation is a nonsense term invented by people with far too much time on their hands in search of something to be offended by. No-one “owns” the right to any cultural practice, nor should they have a say in who gets to create a variation on it.
Specific physical objects of importance are a different matter but copies and variations thereof…no. That’s all fair game.
The instructor offered to change the name of the class to “mindful stretching,” and that was turned down because they couldn’t agree on a French translation.:smack:
Just as bloody well zero is out of copyright. Imagine the royalties we’d all owe.
I envision the current crop of college kids have all the makings of a new Red Guard.
In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Novels, universities and professors exist for the reason of providing entertainingly ridiculous behavior for the amusement of others, and not for any other purpose.
More and more, he’s looking like a prophet.
No, that’d be cultural appropriation.
“I farted in cultural appropriation class” just doesn’t sound the same.
Didja ever see photos (or in real life) of businessmen and politicians in places all over the world wearing neckties and other accoutrements of traditional Western attire? People all over the world have stolen our Western wear!
Y’all should read Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin by Ashley Montagu. The main subject matter is parenting issues and how parents should raise babies. He describes a wide variety of cultural American parenting activities that have been stolen by other cultures around the world.
Ah, but the joke’s on all of them! He also argues that everything about American parenting is just about the worst possible way of doing anything, and all those other cultures are just trashing themselves by glomming onto everything American! Serves them right, those cultural thieves!
In other news: The al-jabr that we stole from those Ay-rabs or whoever they were, we’ve desecrated and mangled beyond anything that al-Khwārizmī would ever recognize! We must all demand that our schools cancel all Algebra classes forthwith!
Way to exclude the mindless community. #EndTheOppression