Stop the American Indian Cultural Appropriation at Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake

Image credit: www.merri-mac.com

Click HERE to sign our petition.

Dear Adam and Ann Boyd, Camp Leadership, and Fellow Alumni of Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake,

We are writing to urge Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake to dissolve their “tribal system” and end the appropriation and homogenization of American Indian cultures. As alumnae who loved our summers at Camp Merri-Mac, we cannot remain silent on the inappropriate behavior we observed and participated in as campers for nearly a decade; especially since this summer, Camp Merri-Mac will celebrate its 75th anniversary with these practices intact.

We have a lot of love for Merri-Mac in our hearts, but we also feel shame over having participated in these hurtful, racist activities. We believe everything that makes summer camp such a wonderful place to be a child can and should exist without causing harm to indigenous peoples. Due to these continued practices, we would never send our own children to the camp that shaped us into who we are today.

We believe the cultural appropriation outlined in this petition informs the mockery of Native peoples and identities. This appropriation perpetuates misinformation and racist ideas about Indigenous American names, histories, stories, and religious beliefs.

We believe Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake can address these issues and reform their camp activities and programs. Many other summer camps across the country have already changed the same practices for the reasons outlined in this petition.

As campers, these are some of the examples of the cultural appropriation we participated in or observed at these summer camps:

• Use of the names “Choctaw,” “Iroquois,” and “Seminole” in a “tribal” system where campers are “initiated” within their first few days of camp, and remain a member of that “tribe” for life
• Referring to uninitiated campers as “palefaces”
• Selling merchandise related to this “tribal” system
• Using feathers, beads, warbonnets, drums, etc. in “ceremonies”
• During initiation, the “Great Spirit” gives a speech about three warring tribes coming together to form a time of peace, which perpetuates the idea of Native peoples as mythical or “vanished” relics of the past
• “War whoops” and chants with lyrics like: “We are the red men / feathers in our head men / down among the dead men / Choctaw” or “Swish tomahawk, fly tomahawk, boom I’m an Iroquois”
• Referring to relay races as “Apache” races
• The “White Feather” rewards system, which began as recently as the early 2000s
• The “Little Chief” rewards system at Timberlake
• Elected leaders are referred to as “Braves,” “Medicine Man” and “Chief”
• The tipi and “tribal council”
• The totem pole (and the camp legend that touching it would bring rain)
• Opening the summer ceremonies by finding the “buried hatchet”

Kat Selwyn in 2005

These are just a few examples of how practices at Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake are perpetuating racist stereotypes. When you conflate and conglomerate traditional indigenous clothing, religious beliefs, ceremonies, and housing structures, you are teaching children that it is OK to steal cultural identities, erase them, and change them to suit your own entertainment.

We believe these practices erase the reality of American Indian and Indigenous American existences. We believe these practices perpetuate disenfranchisement and oppression. We believe these practices encourage children to engage in the erasure of other cultural identities; which amounts to cultural genocide.

When people diminish Native peoples to stereotypes, they engage in a long-standing colonial practice that dehumanizes indigenous peoples, and directly contributes to their continued oppression.

When we talk about this appropriation, we are speaking from personal experience. We both attended Camp Merri-Mac for ten summers. We were both “initiated” within the first few days of our first year at camp. We remember our “initiations” as formative moments, and for many of our summers at camp, our tribal “chief” was someone we looked up to and admired; she was someone we wanted to be. In our final year as campers at age 16, when Kat was elected “chief” of the Seminoles, and Eileen as “chief” of the Choctaw tribe, it was one of our proudest achievements. Unfortunately, this achievement is a source of shame for us, because now, as adults, we know better.

We loved camp. We owe our 24-year-long friendship to camp. Some of our happiest memories stem from those summers.

Kat (left) and Eileen (right) in 1997, 2007, and 2013

We also feel shame, guilt, and regret over our complicity and participation in the “tribal system.” We wore headdresses, painted our faces and bodies, and danced around a campfire; we initiated new campers by smearing paint on their faces. Collectively, we have twenty years of complicity, and almost a decade of silence between us. It makes us feel dirty.

When we look back on our summers at Camp Merri-Mac, it is with a sting of regret: regret for having participated, so ignorantly, in these practices, and in doing so having contributed to a cycle of oppression. Our hope in speaking out is that, among the thousands of other people who have attended these camps or camps with similar “traditions,” there are those who feel the same way about these outdated, hurtful practices.

As privileged people who directly benefited from this system, we feel it is our responsibility to ask that these practices end so that new traditions can be formed.

REFORM IS ALREADY AN INDUSTRY STANDARD

It’s possible to have a summer camp without appropriating American Indians. Thousands of other summer camps do it every year.

The American Camp Association (ACA) outlined guidelines for camp professionals to change appropriative programming in 2018. In “Indigenous Instructional Programming for Camp Professionals,” Fine and McIlwraith write, “indigenous-inspired event days or associated programming should be based on 21st-century cultural understandings in concert with reflective practice, and not a habitual recycling of what is increasingly being viewed as inappropriate behaviors. However well-intentioned indigenous-inspired camp activities may seem, as youth leaders we do not want to be engaging in naive acts of cultural appropriation or the reinforcement of cultural stereotypes (Shore, 2015).”

Many organizations who engage in “Native drag” say that they are doing it out of respect for American Indian cultures and identities. This list was created for educators. It outlines respectful and disrespectful behaviors. Among the disrespectful behaviors are allowing children to speak of American Indians in past-tense; letting children imitate American Indians with stereotypes; or encouraging children to dress up as American Indians. The list outlines, “Even when well-intentioned, costumes involving imitation feathers, face paint, headdresses, and buckskin are disrespectful of traditional Native dress (which many Indians consider honorable or even sacred).” (Understandingprejudice.org)

The YMCA began reforming their “Indian Guide” and “Indian Princess” programs in 2003; these programs were founded almost twenty years before Merri-Mac opened its wooden gates. Kendra James, in “Guiding in the Wrong Direction: The problematic, ongoing history of the Adventure Guides,” writes of her experience as a child in the program, which shares many similarities with the appropriation that continues at Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake. The YMCA changed its program to the “Adventure Guides” at the request of David Narcomey, a Seminole Indian and director of the American Indian Movement of North Florida.

In 2019, the ACA estimated that there are more than 11,000 summer camps in the United States. There are potentially thousands of camps across the country, using the names, symbols, and heritage of American Indian peoples without the permission of the groups they are “pretending” to be; however, in our research, we could not find many examples of other camps that continue these racist “traditions.”

There are possibly less than a dozen camps still engaging in these “traditions,” including Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake. The ones that we could find are also self-advertised private Christian camps located in the American South. The camps on this list were also established before 1960, and advertise “tribal systems” in their own promotional materials and websites:

• Camp Cho-Yeh, Livingston, TX — Although their tribes are the “Alpha and Omega” tribes, their website indicates use of “warpaint,” warbonnets, other ceremonial dress, and an “initiation ceremony”
• Camp Crestridge for Girls, Ridgecrest, NC — “Catawba, Cherokee, Cheyenne, Chippewa, Choctaw, Creek”
• Camp DeSoto, Mentone AL — “Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Creeks”
• Camp Fern, Marshall, TX — “Apache, Bena, Caddo, Cherokee, Owaisso, Tejas”
• Camp Laney for Boys, Mentone, AL — “Apaches and Comanches”
• Camp Mystic for Girls, Hunt, TX — “Kiowas and Tonkawas”
• Camp Ridgecrest for Boys, Ridgecrest, NC — “Apache, Arapaho, Choctaw, Comanche, Mohican, Shawnee, and Sioux”
• Camp Winnataska, Pell City, AL — “Indian Night”
• Heart O the Hills Camp, Hunt, TX — “Tribal” themed Field Day, “Pawnee and Shawnee” tribal system
• Prude Ranch Summer Camp, Fort Davis, TX — “Comanche” and “Apache”

We would like to invite the alumni of these camps to also call for an end to the cultural appropriation that persists at these summer camps.

THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURAL APPROPRIATION AT SUMMER CAMPS

To examine the heart of this issue, it’s important to understand why so many summer camps began appropriating and homogenizing American Indian cultures and identities in the first place. Many of these practices can be traced back to G. Stanley Hall and Ernest Thompson Seton (Deloria, Playing Indian). Deloria writes,

The connections between Indians and children already had a long history, the two being paired rhetorically as natural, simple, naive, preliterate, and devoid of self-consciousness. It was no accident that romantic literature often referred to Indians as children of nature and that they were denoted as childlike wards in their political relations with the U.S. government. Children, in turn, could be conceptualized as noble savages with equal ease. (Playing Indian, 106)

Hall and Seton were responsible for spreading the idea that the stages of childhood development could be mapped alongside “the progressive evolution of human society from savagery to civilization.” (Deloria) This led to a form of psychology that insisted children needed to progress from “savagery” to “civilization” in distinct stages. Seton was among the first, in creating a group called the Woodcraft Indians, to offer “institutionally supported identities” through tribal badges, honors, and a “hierarchy of chiefs.” Seton traveled North America, encouraging other camps to adopt practices like council fires and tribal systems.

In the 1880s, summer camps appealed to a Victorian desire to get “back-to-nature” and to recapture some of the “hard work” values of the American frontier. The “vanishing wilderness” was lamented. Summer camps aimed to provide “respite from what were regarded as the moral and physical degradations of urban life, evils to which women and children were understood to be particularly prone.” (Van Slick, A Manufactured Wilderness). Originally summer camps had a more militaristic theme, but after World War I that fell out of favor in the wake of the horrors of modern warfare. People longed for a “simpler” world, more connected to nature; they also wanted an escape from the increasingly diverse cities in the American north and west.

Van Slick writes,

[P]laying Indian at summer camp reinforced the idea of the Vanishing Indian, pushing Native American culture safely into the past and forestalling any consideration of Native American realities in the present. . . . As campers continued to play Indian, the status of actual Native Americans faded from their consciousness.

As ideas about whiteness and white culture were cemented in the twentieth century, “partly in response to the internal migration of African Americans that changed the racial dynamics of northern and western cities. In this sense, the pervasive use of Indian motifs is significant, both in reinforcing white privilege and in contributing to the larger cultural project of redrawing the boundaries between those who were considered white and those who were not.” (Van Slick)

These are the racist roots of American Indian and Indigenous American cultural appropriation in summer camps. It’s a practice grounded in the ideals of white supremacy.

It would never be acceptable for summer campers to “pretend” to be any other demographic of people the way that they “pretend” to be American Indians.

A summer camp’s website would never use images of young girls and boys in blackface to advertise how much fun their campers were having. On Merri-Mac’s website, the link “Join Your Tribe” takes you to a page that talks about traditions and unity. The banner image is of teenage girls, covered in “war paint,” wearing plastic feathers and warbonnets. Looking at them, we can almost hear the tribal alma mater songs:

“Iroquois tribe in memory,
a treasure to you and to me.”

“Each Choctaw girl at Merri-Mac has a heart that’s pure and true
she has a spirit for her tribe that’s glorious to see . . .”

“Ask the sky above and ask the earth below,
where is Merri-Mac and why do we love her so?
Which ones are the best of campers? They’re all Seminoles.”

These ceremonies and songs send powerful messages to the children who sing them. The messages are, “It’s OK to pretend to be Choctaw, Iroquois, and Seminole. It’s OK to use identities that are not your own. It’s part of our tradition. It’s not hurting anyone. This is part of our bonding experience.”

In a 2003 Los Angeles Times article, executive board member of the American Indian Movement Vernon Bellecourt said programs like these are “literally incubators. They take the minds of children and ingrain superficial images of the Indian people, like we don’t exist anymore. It victimizes all children.”

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO CHANGE

What is the impact of children participating in this appropriation? The harm that these practices cause, in the form of spreading misinformation and racial bias, has been clearly outlined by American Indian activists. Appropriation is potentially a contributing factor to Native teen suicide, which is 70 percent higher than for any other group in the country (Schilling). Adrienne Keene, member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, outlines the issues on her site:

First, wearing headdresses promotes the continuing stereotyping of Native peoples. The image of a warbonnet and warpaint wearing Indian is one that has been created and perpetuated by Hollywood and only bears minimal resemblance to traditional regalia of Plains tribes. It furthers the stereotype that Native peoples are one monolithic culture, when in fact there are 500+ distinct tribes, each with their own cultures. It also places Native people in the historic past, as something that cannot exist in modern society. We don’t walk around in ceremonial attire every day, but we still exist and are still Native.

In addition, headdresses, feathers, and warbonnets have deep spiritual significance. The wearing of feathers and warbonnets in Native communities is not a fashion choice. Eagle feathers are presented as symbols of honor and respect and have to be earned. Some communities give them to children when they become adults through special ceremonies, others present the feathers as a way of commemorating an act or event of deep significance. Warbonnets especially are reserved for respected figures of power.

I see the wearing of a fake feathered headdress as akin to dressing in blackface — it is the donning of a costume of a racial group that is not one’s own, based off of stereotyped caricatures that allow for the continuing subordination of Indian people.

That continued subordination is also big business. The ACA reports summer camps are an estimated $18 billion industry. In Western North Carolina the industry is worth an estimated $365 million (North Carolina Youth Camp Association).

We believe summer camp owners profit from having structured activities and systems of leadership based around the identities of Native Americans; they profit through the sales of tribal themed T-shirts, pins, flags, and other merchandise. If each girl in a 600-person summer camp purchased one $20 tribal T-shirt, that’s $12,000 in sales.

While we each spent ten summers of our lives pretending to be indigenous, Camp Merri-Mac never taught us anything about the realities of Native American, Indigenous, or American Indian peoples.

We never learned that nineteen Choctaw Nation men were the first to use their own language as a transmitted “code” during World War I, preventing spies from listening in on radio transmissions (Choctaw Nation).

We did not learn about the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the only tribe that never signed a peace treaty with the United States government (Seminole Tribe of Florida).

We did not learn that the word “Iroquois” refers to not just one tribe, but a confederacy of six distinct nations.

We did not learn, as children, that American Indians did not receive nationwide citizenship until 1924; only 21 years before Camp Merri-Mac opened its gates (Library of Congress).

We were not taught that 60 miles from the gates of Camp Merri-Mac is the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the original inhabitants of the lands that encompass Camp Merri-Mac (Eastern Band of the Cherokee, Native Land Map).

TO OUR FELLOW CAMP ALUMNI

We understand this transition requires saying goodbye, and letting go, of a piece of your childhood, which may form part of your identity. “I am a Choctaw,” we grew up saying. “I’m a Seminole.” “I’m an Iroquois.” The truth is that we are not. We never were. We have no right to those identities.

Reforming cultural appropriation requires an acknowledgement that, as a child or a young adult, we were complicit in a system of oppression. Van Slick writes, “The hard truth is that racism and good intentions can coexist; it is one of the things that makes racism so difficult to eradicate.”

When we were in our early twenties, we got tattoos commemorating our time at summer camp. When we look at our tattoos, we have complicated feelings: our love for each other is there, and our shared experiences; but also feelings of regret over our complicity in this system. We believe that this letter is how we can participate in dismantling a system of white privilege from the inside: by speaking out, as alumnae. People of color have asked for an end to these practices in hundreds of books, articles, opinion pieces, and social media posts, but so often white people are silent on this front.

Robin Diangelo, in White Fragility, outlines why it is important for white people to speak up about racism:

The expectation that people of color should teach white people about racism is another aspect of white racial innocence that reinforces several problematic racial assumptions. . . . [I]t implies that racism is something that happens to people of color and has nothing to do with us and that we consequently cannot be expected to have any knowledge of it. This framework denies that racism is a relationship in which both groups are involved. by leaving it to people of color to tackle racial issues, we offload the tensions and social dangers of speaking openly onto them. We can ignore the risks ourselves and remain silent on questions of our own culpability. (p. 64)

We believe that all of the things that make Camp Merri-Mac and Camp Timberlake great can exist without cultural appropriation. Camp taught us to be leaders and problem-solvers. It gave us an environment where we could be free to be children. We learned horseback riding, archery, fencing, how to throw pottery, how to compete, how to scream at the top of our lungs and sing with our full hearts. All of that can continue to exist; all that needs to be done is to remove the problematic costume obscuring it. If you take away the “Native drag,” you will still have an environment that is a beautiful place to be a child. We believe the Native American cultural appropriation is superlative, and spoils the beauty of camaraderie and an appreciation for nature and for one another that summer camp provides.

We urge our fellow alumni to add their voices to this petition, asking for an end to these practices. We urge anyone else in the public who feels the same way we do to sign the petition and speak up.

We believe happy memories should not come at the expense of other people’s lives, cultures, livelihoods, or identities.

Join us and click here to sign our petition.

First, last, & always,

Kat Selwyn
Spirit of Sportsmanship, 2005
Camp Merri-Mac alumna, 1996–2005

Eileen Rush Tatum
Spirit of Good Cheer, 2005
Camp Merri-Mac alumna, 1995–2005

References:

Cherokee, Eastern Band of. “The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.” Cherokee, NC, visitcherokeenc.com/eastern-band-of-the-cherokee/.

“Code Talkers: Choctaw Nation.” Code Talkers | Choctaw Nation, www.choctawnation.com/history-culture/people/code-talkers.

Congress Granted Citizenship to All Native Americans Born in the U.S., www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/jazz/jb_jazz_citizens_1.html.

Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian. Yale Univ. Press, 2007.

DiAngelo, Robin J.. White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Allen Lane, 2019.

“Economic Impact.” North Carolina Youth Camp Association, www.nccamps.org/economic-impact/.

Fine, Stephen, and Thomas McIlwraighth. “Indigenous Instructional Programming for Camp Professionals.” American Camp Association, 19 Mar. 2018, www.acacamps.org/resource-library/camping-magazine/indigenous-instructional-programming-camp-professionals.

James, Kendra. “Guiding in the Wrong Direction.” Shondaland, Shondaland, 12 Mar. 2018, www.shondaland.com/live/a19381796/guiding-in-the-wrong-direction/.

Kamb, Lewis. “Y programs shed Indian trappings now deemed racist quotes activist.” Seattle PI. 25 April 2003. https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Y-programs-shed-Indian-trappings-now-deemed-racist-1113323.php

Keene, Adrienne. “Dear YMCA, I haz the sads.” Native Appropriations. 7 June 2011. https://nativeappropriations.com/2011/06/dear-ymca-i-haz-the-sads.html

𑁋. “Hoya Hoya, Cultural Appropriation! Or Why Suburban White Folks Shouldn’t Play Indian.” Native Appropriations. 3 June 2011. https://nativeappropriations.com/2011/06/hoya-hoya-cultural-appropriation-or-why-suburban-white-folks-shouldnt-play-indian.html

McMahon, Ryan. “Indigenous stereotypes have no place at summer camps.” The Globe and Mail, 7 July 2016. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/travel/activities-and-interests/indigenous-stereotypes-have-no-place-at-summer-camps/article30787925/

Macleod, Liam. “Why We Made the Unanimous Decision to Change the Name and Native Mascot of our Traditional Summer Camp: Camp IHC.” https://www.campihc.com/news_posts/why-we-made-the-unanimous-decision-to-change-the-name-and-native-mascot-of-our-traditional-summer-camp.

“NativeLand.ca — ᏣᎳᎫᏪᏘᏱ Tsalaguwetiyi (Cherokee, East).” Native, native-land.ca/maps/territories/cherokee/.

Seminole Tribe of Florida, www.semtribe.com/stof.

Schilling, Vincent. “Boy Scouts ‘Have Been One of the Worst Culprits’ of Cultural Appropriation.” News Maven, Indian Country Today, 14 Sept. 2019, newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/news/boy-scouts-have-been-one-of-the-worst-culprits-of-cultural-appropriation-Cf-Moaug90Knza6-Oz9A9A.

Stassell, Stephanie. “Group Loses ‘Indian’ in Name, Not Spirit.” Los Angeles Times, 1 Dec. 2003, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-dec-01-me-guides1-story.html.

“Teaching About Native American Issues.” UnderstandingPrejudice.org, Social Psychology Network, secure.understandingprejudice.org/teach/native.htm.

Van Slyck, Abigail Ayers. A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960. University of Minnesota Press, 2010.