My overwhelming sentiment about this episode is: “Ugh”. Because it makes pretty much everyone look bad, including in ways that reinforce gender stereotypes. First, Voyager comes across a hailing beacon using a Federation signal. They decide to follow it into a nebula, even though their sensors would be useless and it’s practically screaming “You’re going …
According to the official Star Trek: Voyager episode guide, Chakotay’s people and their cousins, the Rubber Tree People, are supposedly descendant of “(pre)Mayans.” Yet Chakotay’s culture, as portrayed in the series, provides a perfect example of the generic “Indian” culture found in early American newspapers, where many individual cultures were merged into a single “Indian” …
“Tattoo” is a really interesting episode to look at “positive stereotyping” or “positive discrimination” as it relates to Chakotay and Native American culture. As TV Tropes defines it, positive discrimination is what happens “when the token minority character can do no wrong”: In particular, you will virtually never see Native Americans in more recent works, without …