We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.

I was delighted to find a video this morning on YouTube that meshed two of my personal interests in a way that I never expected to find them, or at least in any amount of depth.

A Little Background on Jazza and Tabletop Time

Jazza is a YouTuber who needs little introduction. He is an artist who has more than five million subscribers and who has been actively and successfully building a business for several years. But in the last eighteen months or so he decided he wanted to get back to his roots, to his childhood love of Warhammer.

Now, Jazza being Jazza–a kind of irreverently goofy person who never does anything halfway–he decided to create an entire channel dedicated to his wargaming hobby: Tabletop Time. The interesting thing about Tabletop Time is that it’s kind of outside the beltway of the mainstream Warhammer YouTubers. There is a large number of wargaming YouTubers who run in sort of the same social circles, or at least the same sort of wargaming status quo. Jazza is, for some reason I’m not entirely sure of, a bit of an outsider. It is likely because wargaming is kind of his side hustle and not his primary devotion.

For whatever reason, Tabletop Time is a different sort of channel to your established Miniacs and Squidmars and Tabletop Minions.

The Space Bears

Forgive me if I’m getting any details wrong here–I’ve been following this project for some time, and may not be clear–but Jazza has been working on his own homebrew chapter of the Space Marines, the Space Bears, for most of his life, starting as a kid. But now that he has far more resources than he did as a kid, and far better art abilities, he is–again–diving in headfirst.

The Space Bears are a successor chapter of the Space Wolves (if you recall, I made my own successor chapter to the Space Wolves, the Rock Badgers). And Jazza has been sculpting and creating them all in great detail to the point that he worked with a 3D modeling company to create his own bits: 3D printable helmets and claws and such.

Last week, Jazza showed his inspiration in creating the Space Bears, and said that he was taking notes from Native American tribes.

Now, immediately my ears pricked up, and not necessarily in a good way. I am nothing more than an English-Norwegian white man, but I lived on the Navajo Nation for two years and feel a deep kinship the the people there. And I am very sensitive to issues of cultural appropriation–people from one culture taking elements from another, out of context, and creating something distinctly wrong. I knew enough about the subject that when Jazza said he was inspired by Native Americans, I cringed, knowing that he was going to get some flack.

(My spider sense was tingling particularly because he said he was basing the Space Bears on “Native Americans”, and not on a certain Native American nation, tribe, or group. Saying you’re basing something on Native Americans is like saying you’re basing something on Asians–the cultures can be as vastly different as the people of Tokyo are from the people of Mumbai.)

And, as expected, he got pushback in the YouTube comments. This comment is the one that he highlighted in his video–that he was using very Nordic (Space Wolves-ish) faces instead of faces that look more Native American–but there were many more comments like it. Jazza had shown images on his last video that looked similar to Navajo rugs alongside canoes alongside bear imagery, and all of these things don’t fit together perfectly.

Fortunately, Jazza did the right thing: he took a step back, did some research, and contacted a subject matter expert. Basically, he determined that his Space Bears were going to be based on the Ojibwe people, and then he reached out to Kris Belleau, an Ojibwe man who has been running his own wargaming YouTube channel for nearly a decade. (Kris Belleau might be best known for his work on Miniwargaming, but has his own channel, The Way of the Brush.)

Jazza and Kris Belleau Talking Cultural Appropriation and Wargaming

This led to the most fascinating discussion I’ve heard in quite some time: a melding of two of my deepest interests–wargaming and Native American cultures–in a way that I would never have expected.

The conversation is fascinating. It’s not the entire point of Jazza’s video. In fact, it’s something that he only links to in the comments of his original video because his main video is still about the creation of the Space Bears. But I would urge you to watch the conversation if you have any interests in this topic–and especially if you’re interested in the overall topic of cultural appropriation. It’s a hot button issue, to be sure, and this video is informative and thought-provoking without ever being preachy or political.

Based on the conversation (which is about 55 minutes of great content) Jazza changed the appearance of his chapter master, giving him, among other things, a face that is more appropriate (he had someone sculpt it for him), a dreamcatcher (yes that’s an authentically Ojibwe thing), and feathers (they have a whole discussion about the use of feathers).

Anyway, I was delighted by the unexpected direction that this all took, by the different mental road that it sent me down today. If you don’t follow Tabletop Time or The Way of the Brush, check them out.