Totem Poles, Teepees, and Token Traditions: ‘Playing Indian’ at Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955

Wall, Sharon

doi:10.3138/chr/86.3.513

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…In many industrialized societies in the early twentieth century, summer camps were conceived of as opportunities to socialize young men and women through access to what were thought to be the healthy and wholesome properties of nature (van Slyck 2006). The Scouts and Girl Guides had a similar goal, but these organizations were also a means to subjugate peoples and races to European and North American hegemonywhether Indigenous peoples at home or colonized ones abroad (Alexander 2017;Honeck 2018;Wall 2005).…”

Section: Public Spaces and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

2023

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where she also directs the Institute for Child and Youth Studies. Her book Guiding Modern Girls: Girlhood, Empire, and Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s (University of British Columbia Press, 2017) received the Wilson Prize for transnational history and the Canadian History of Education Association Founders' Prize. A former editor of the journal Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, she is also the author of numerous articles and chapters about agency, emotions, settler colonialism, youth organizations, and the First World War.

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Section: Public Spaces and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

2023

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“…Camp leaders encouraged the boys to fantasize so that they might return to the city renewed in spirit and ready to focus on more noble pursuits. According to Victorian psychologist G. Stanley Hall, boys were encouraged to work out their “savage tendencies” so that they could then return to civilization without them (Wall 521).…”

Section: From Waterfront To Campfirementioning

confidence: 99%

Wilderness Laboratories: Rhetorical Acts of Surveillance at American Summer Camps

Howard¹

2015

J of American Culture

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“…Sharon Wall explains that when campers "played Indian," it was based on "a fantastical amalgam of Aboriginal traditions projected onto one mythic Indian Other." 79 The continental European nations on display, including Germany and Italy, represented the ethnic backgrounds of a handful of the party's organizers, volunteers, and observers. Filling the booths with folksy, peasant-like interpreters, however, implied that these nations were stuck in some sort of time warp.…”

Section: mentioning

confidence: 99%

“Foreigners in Town”: Leisure, Consumption, and Cosmopolitanism in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Tillsonburg, Ontario1

Beausaert¹

2013

jcha

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the small town of Tillsonburg, Ontario contained a population that was over eighty-six percent Anglo-Celtic in origin. Increasingly, however, local leisure activities began to incorporate “ethnic” food, dress, and mannerisms so that citizens could momentarily become “foreigners” and “consume” knowledge of other nations and peoples. Two of the more notable venues where participants acted out racialized identities—the “Garden Party of the Nations” and the Ladies’ Travel Club—showcase desires to consume markers of foreignness while concurrently displaying an acceptance of these cultures. Using Tillsonburg as a case study, this article examines how engaging with the “foreign” in patterns of leisure and consumption was a way for citizens (and women in particular) to convey an air of cosmopolitanism and cultural refinement in the face of critiques that small towns were insular and unsophisticated. Their cultural appropriations, however, represent grossly distorted understandings of races, ethnicities, and cultures that existed outside their Euro-Canadian one. Though efforts by Tillsonburg’s populace to appear more cosmopolitan were grounded in a desire to expand understandings of “the foreign,” this occurred only on their own terms and in controlled spaces.

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Totem Poles, Teepees, and Token Traditions: ‘Playing Indian’ at Ontario Summer Camps, 1920-1955

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

Wilderness Laboratories: Rhetorical Acts of Surveillance at American Summer Camps

“Foreigners in Town”: Leisure, Consumption, and Cosmopolitanism in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Tillsonburg, Ontario1

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