Reading note on Totem Poles, Teepees, and Token Traditions: ‘Playing Indian’ at Ontario Summer Camps, 1920–1955 by Sharon Wall

Sharon Wall started this chapter by explaining how the notion of “playing Indian” appeared and how it became popular among white people though they don’t have extreme enthusiasm in it. Therefore, for many who were not seeking wholesale changes of identity, playing Indian part-time would suffice. Summer camp was one site in which this impulse could be readily indulged. And it was also a place where, it was understood, children learned to ‘live like Indians during the camping season.’ Wall takes a critical look at the fascination with playing Indian by exploring camps’ Indian programming and representations of Native people in camp literature. And Wall also attempts to make sense of the curious cultural phenomenon to place the cultural appropriation in a broad historical context. Like the summer camp phenomenon as a whole, the so-called Indian traditions which were part a broader anti-modernist impulse in twentieth-century Ontario, reflected middle-class unease with the pace and direction of cultural change, with a world that appeared to be irrevocably industrial, decidedly urban and increasingly secular. Therefore, at Ontario camps, ‘going Native’ had little to do with seeking a balm for the non-Native experience of modernity. It reflected modern desire to create a sense of belonging, community, and spiritual experience by modelling anti-modern images of Aboriginal life. Wall mentioned in the chapter that clearly Canadians and Americans saw camping as having great transformative power on children, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century. Wall gives the number of American campers who chose Ontario private camps as their campground of choice, perhaps because Canada’s nature represented the ultimate wilderness, and therefore, the most impressive form of nature. Perhaps future historians could take up this point more thoroughly and examine if Americans were playing “Canadian,” because that identity was much more closely connected to nature than the more heavily urbanized and industrialized United States.

I think in the chapter Wall articulated the tendency of Ontario’s camps to “go native” by incorporating the culture and traditions of First Nations into camp programming. I can see that Wall explains how “playing Indian offered children the emotional outlet of intense experience not frequently promoted by modern childrearing experts and standing in contrast to the camps’ simultaneous preoccupation with order and control”. In this sense, “Indians” were considered as close to nature as possible, so it was good to expose to their cultures. However, she also critiques the white, modernist, colonialist fascination of “playing Indian,” and explores the camping movement’s contribution to the ongoing rationalization of colonization through the promotion of negative images of Indian savagery.

One question that came into my mind while reading is that considering children’s performance, why not comparing the children in summer camps and regular residential schools to track children’s development. When white children were sent to “play Indian” while Indian children were forced to embrace modernity or ‘play white’ to some extent. I’m also considering that why white people use the idea of Indians other than anyone else. Is this the process of pursuing their national identity?