Are Cultural Tours Built on Exploitation?
Photo Credit: Fort McDowell, Yavapai Nation. The Indian Country tourism board in the U.S. is working on strengthening Native-owned businesses. AIANTA
Skift Take
Cultural tours to communities of color involve many parties: travel advisors, tour operators, service providers, travelers themselves, and more. So who's responsible for making sure that a trip to an indigenous community or a historically black neighborhood is carried out ethically?
Let’s say a tour group visits a Native American community, buys some jewelry, listens to a storyteller, tastes some fry bread, then leaves. Questions arise that might not apply to a generic walking tour of Chicago.
Who brought in the tourists? Who controls the storytelling? Who’s making money off this? Are the tourists patronizing Native-owned businesses and staying at Native-owned accommodations? These questions apply to indigenous communities around the world, historically black neighborhoods in cities like Paris and New York, and other spaces defined by non-white groups.
With cultural tours, the relationship between travel advisors, tour operators, service providers, travelers, and local communities is sensitive, and the culture can easily get shortchanged, both financially and in terms of controlling the narrative.
“If we are truly these experts in travel, that is what we’ve got to do,” said Gavin Tollman, CEO of tour operator Trafalgar of building ethical cultur
