This Girl Dealt With An Offensive Homework Assignment In The Best Possible Way

Nyemah Greenhouse, a 5-year-old in Louisiana, came home with some homework that seriously troubled her mother, Tremeka. The kindergartener had been told to "dress like an Indian" as a pre-Thanksgiving assignment in mid-November, as Huffington Post reported. Initially, Tremeka was going to have her daughter skip the insensitive assignment altogether. But instead she came up with a brilliant, wearable retort so her daughter could, technically, complete the task and not get penalized by the school. Instead of a school-approved act of cultural appropriation by way of, say, a feathered headdress, Tremeka suggested Nyemah dress up as a Dakota Access Pipeline protester. “I’ve been following the story of the DAPL protesters and thought it would be good for Nyemah to go dressed as a water protester instead of an actual Indian ‘costume,’” Tremeka told Huffington Post. The result: a pillowcase repurposed as a vest, with "#NODAPL" and "Water Is Life" written in watercolors and acrylic paints, complete with Nyemah's handprint, as Mic noted. Nyemah's older sister, Taniyah, pitched in to help craft the clever costumed response to an offensive assignment. Taniyah also tweeted a shot from Facebook of her younger sister in the getup, noting in the caption her and her mother's disdain for the assignment: "We weren't feeling that at all." Besides teaching her daughters that there can, in fact, be workarounds for culturally insensitive situations, Tremeka wants to make sure her daughters "aren't living in a bubble and then they get into the real world and it's a shock," Greenhouse told Mic of her creative solve for a questionable situation. And, thankfully, the activism-fueled interpretation of an offensive assignment didn't get Nyemah in trouble at school.