Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1992
Abstract
When I was a little boy, my mother, bless her heart, used to buy me books like Ben Hunt's Indian Crafts and Lore in a forlorn effort to keep me somewhat "in touch" with the indigenous aspect of my heritage. Hence, early on, I was exposed to such boy scoutish "homages" to things Indian as using uncooked macaroni to simulate the bone employed in making chokers and breastplates, making "peace pipes" out of wooden dowels, and pasting carefully colored bits of graph paper to tee-shirts in an effort to create the appearance of a beaded "Indian costume." It was, mom's best intentions notwithstanding, the stuff of John Ford movies, "Koshari" dancers, and little white kids dressed in paint and turkey feathers during the nation's annual pre-Thanksgiving classroom "sensitivity" exercises, an unconscionably arrogant trivialization and degradation by the dominant society of everything meaningful in Native material culture.
Comments
Published in GREAT PLAINS QUARTERLY 12:3 (Summer 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.