In 2017, Hal Niedzviecki, editor of the Writers’ Union of Canada's publication Write, published an editorial in which he suggested there should be an ‘Appropriation Prize’. As an introduction to an issue of the publication that featured several Indigenous writers, Niedzviecki's editorial attracted both support (and funding for an actual such prize), largely from white Canadian journalists, and outrage (some of which was directed to funding the Indigenous Voices Awards in response). The second decade of the twentieth century was not the first time that cultural appropriation was hotly contested in Canada and beyond. The early 1990s saw a number of Indigenous writers demand that white artists, in the words of Lenore Keeshig-Tobias (Anishinaabe), ‘stop stealing [Indigenous] stories’ (1990, 7). In 1994, an Australian legal case (Milpurrurru et al. v. Indofurn Pty Ltd et al.) addressed Indigenous copyright in patterned carpets; the ruling stipulated that ‘[t]he right to create paintings and other artworks depicting creation and dreaming stories, and to use pre-existing designs and well recognized totems of the clan, resides in the traditional owners (or custodians) of the stories or images’ (qtd in Ziff and Rao 1997b, 16). Yet cultural appropriation – and its defenders – despite the work of the 1990s contesting it – has persisted: white US author Lionel Shriver at the Brisbane Writers’ Festival in 2016, the year before Niedzviecki's editorial, had equated cultural appropriation with ‘try[ing] on other people's hats’ (qtd in Convery 2016), dismissing and deflating concerns about cultural representation, particularly when those in the position of doing the representing belong to the white mainstream and those being represented do not. As Bruce Ziff and Pratima V. Rao write, however, ‘When white writers appropriate the images of [non-white people], a political event has occurred’ (1997b, 5). White artists who cry foul at accusations of cultural appropriation use art as a defence against politics, as though art is always already exempt from the political.