When I was six or so, my dad made me join Indian Guides, the YMCA’s pathetic version of Boy Scouts, and one festooned with astonishingly tone-deaf and un-PC Native American clichés straight out of a John Wayne western. Think tomahawks, faux-deerskin, and feathers, lots of feathers.
Each young member adopted (or just made up) cartoony “Indian” names for themselves so we felt like a real “tribe.” For some reason I was Sleeping Lizard, which, on reflection, I’m certain was a joke by my ha-ha funny dad. Apparently, a blazing warrior I was not.
Indian Guides exalted all the usual outdoorsy crap, from hiking and sharing campfires to learning how to shoot bow and arrows. We raced Pinewood Derby cars and learned, in comically broad strokes, about American Indian culture. Headdresses were involved. I’m surprised we didn’t wear red face.
One activist against the Guides has said that kids’ programs like it 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.”
While “victimize” is strong sauce for what Indian Guides did to me — it mostly made me want to yank off my absurd “Indian” necklace, which was made of beads and dry macaroni, and go home and play with my “Star Wars” action figures — enough people bristled at the group’s ethos.
In the early aughts, the YMCA, under pressure from Native groups, changed the program’s name to Adventure Guides and removed all references to Indians from guidebooks and activities. There would be no more meeting invitations in the shape of little tepees, no more petty cash called “wampum,” and no more greeting others with “How How.”
How How? For Christ’s sake. I bet we even called our meetings pow-wows.
But let’s rewind to the Pinewood Derby, a storied cultural event made famous by the Boy Scouts that would seem to have zero to do with sacred Native American lore. This is where, with the considerable help of dads, kids built their own unpowered, unmanned miniature cars from wood, usually from kits containing a block of pine wood, plastic wheels, and metal axles. You painted and stuck decals on the cars, and, if savvy, attached fishing weights for maximum propulsion down the track.
Except in decorating my car, which I dubbed the Blue Bomber for it’s cobalt paint job, I did no work on it. What — was I going to use a jigsaw and a wood sander? I was six.
Never mind. Though a blur now, I set the Blue Bomber at the top of the ramp next to a half dozen other homemade racers and let her rip. I did this several times. And won every race. I walked with the day’s first place trophy. Indian Guides might have been a gross masquerade, ignorant and disrespectful, and boring as hell, but at this moment it was golden.
Sleeping Lizard crushed it.
GNASHING. 