Sharon Wall - 'Playing Indian' at Ontario summer camps, 1920-1955

Sharon Wall explores the popularity of “playing Indian” at Ontario summer camps. Having children enact idealized narratives and images of the racialized  “Indian” was very common from roughly 1920-1955, she writes.  It was a Canadian tradition which had less to do with honouring aboriginal heritage than the idea that idealized versions of native traditions offered a useful “anti-modern” outlet for the children. Focusing on the Ontario camping establishment, Wall is showing how a changing society and culture “intensified the appeal of Native symbols, rituals and role playing” – and she is building on the scholarly tradition of Philip Deloria, Playing Indian and Shari Huhndorf, Going Native. She shows how “playing Indian” at camp connected to new developments in society’s understanding of the child; pointed to the need to find other forms of belonging and “spirituality” in a secular age; and reflected a racialized dimension. A key takeaway of this article for me: participation in these symbols was “not without meaning” within the camp and may have afforded some outlets for creativity and expression that were not normally available. At the same time, it has to be underlined that camp participants fabricated the kinds of scripts that were useful to them. The scripts were fictions – some with only the most tenuous connection to aboriginal heritage.  Wood shows how some people began to question the design of Indian programming in the camps by the end of the 1940s.

The participation in “native rituals” had a gendered element, we learn. Boys’s activities focused on enacting “violent hypermasculinity” (consistent with the views of “racial capitulation” of the day) and girls’s activities focused on ideals of domesticity and craft-making with “Indian” themes.  There is interesting evidence of the “ongoing but limited” engagement of aboriginals at the camps. Wood is also careful to bring out differences between the official camp literature on playing Indian and what transpired in practice, drawing from a wide range of sources. She acknowledges the difficulty of assessing impact and makes the interesting point that adults as well as children in different ways were involved in a kind of identity work when they promoted or engaged in “playing Indian.” 

One criticism of the article is Wood’s use of the term anti-modern. I understand that her point is that the camp promoters were contrasting modern, citified life with an artificial construct of the native. But Wall is using as one of her seminal texts Jackson Lears’ No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, written more than 35 years ago. Although one of her other seminal texts, Ian McKay’s Quest of the Folk: Antimodernism and Cultural Selection in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia is a more recent work, I think that today it is generally harder to use terms like “modern” and “anti-modern” confidently in the way it was once possible to. For example, a “getting back to nature” movement can be seen as a response to modernity, but in another way it is actually a part of modernization and urbanization, of developing new spaces of leisure.  The creation of the park system (in many cases running into conflict with Native lands, it must be said) and development of the infrastructure for these camps: all of these are “modern” prerequisites for the so-called “antimodern” need to get back to nature.  And it is in line with other developments of this era, such as outdoor education and physical education in the public schools.  Moreover, the openness to “new ways of feeling and of experiencing the self” that is identified with camp culture in the article strikes me as a laudable idea (usually), but not one that is particularly modern OR anti-modern.

I did like the wealth of resources referred to in this article. To add to Wall’s list another article which came out following  hers: Anne Marie Murnaghan of the University of Manitoba has written “Exploring race and nation in playground propaganda in early twentieth-century Toronto” (2013) in the International Journal of Play.