Selves in play: Sports, scouts, and American cultural ... - SAGE Journals

Article

Selves in play: Sports, scouts, and American cultural citizenship

International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3) 390–409 © The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1012690210370380 http://irs.sagepub.com

Pauline Turner Strong University of Texas at Austin, USA

Laurie Posner

Independent Scholar, San Antonio, Texas, USA

Abstract US youth organizations, several now celebrating their hundredth birthdays, have inherited a history of crafting selves through cultural appropriation. In organizations such as the YMCA, Boy Scouts of America, and Camp Fire Girls, woodcraft and wilderness sports associated with Native Americans have played a privileged role, serving to construct American citizens through a form of mimesis popularly known as ‘playing Indian’. As dominant ways of dealing with cultural diversity have changed from assimilation and cultural appropriation to multicultural inclusion, and as various anti-discrimination laws have been enacted, US youth organizations have struggled to transform their traditions.This article tracks a history of cultural appropriation and organized play in US youth development organizations in order to understand these organizations’ dilemmas and strategies as they attempt to remain vital and relevant in the 21st century.

Keywords cultural appropriation, multiculturalism, playing Indian, wilderness sports, youth development

The original 1910 edition of the Boy Scouts of America manual is subtitled A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-craft (Seton and Baden-Powell, 1910), therein revealing the close relationship among wilderness sports, the crafting of selves, and the practice of scouting in the United States (Figure 1). In this formative moment at the turn of the 20th century, US youth development organizations were inventing themselves as the foundries of a distinctively American character (MacLeod, 1983). One hundred years later, these same organizations are struggling to recast themselves in response to new ideologies of gender and citizenship, competing youth activities, and shifting Corresponding author: Pauline Turner Strong, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, C3200, Austin, TX 78712, USA Email: [email protected]

Strong and Posner

391

Figure 1. Original Boy Scouts of America handbook cover (1910–11). Cover art based on the British cover by Robert Baden-Powell

demographics. In the wake of crisis, controversy, and critique, US youth organizations are re-examining their goals, programs, and outreach strategies. This includes a reconsideration of one of their most distinctive practices: the use of symbols, rituals, attire, and outdoor sports derived from indigenous American cultures. Much as college and professional sports teams have been called to abandon pseudoIndian mascots, trademarks, and logos in recent years (Coombe, 1998; Staurowsky, 2006; Strong, 2004), youth organizations have faced charges of cultural appropriation and lawsuits alleging discrimination. At the national level, organizations like the Boy Scouts, the YMCA, and Camp Fire USA have slowly come to recognize that cherished practices drawn from indigenous cultures are not innocuous traditions but, instead,

392

International Review for the Sociology of Sport 45(3)

expressions of White privilege and exclusion. Nevertheless, these practices have proven to be resilient. This, we suggest, is because the very subjectivities of generations of Americans have been formed through embodying Indianness at a young age. Today’s youth programs are struggling to develop a less fraught repertoire of practices, but these efforts are often met with resistance from those who are highly invested in the centuriesold American tradition of mimesis known as ‘playing Indian’. This article considers two main questions, one directed to the past, the other to the present. First, how has ‘playing Indian’ through the appropriation of indigenous sports served to craft American selves and particular forms of cultural citizenship? Second, how are sporting traditions in today’s youth development organizations being transformed in response to critiques of cultural appropriation and the emergence of multiculturalism as a dominant educational ideology in the US? The analysis is grounded in the interdisciplinary literature on various ways in which cultural practices and the production of identities cross cultural borders, including assimilation, appropriation, and hybridity. We are indebted to Philip Deloria’s analysis of the history of ‘playing Indian’, which closely examines the relationship between mimetic play and notions of authenticity in early US youth organizations (Deloria, 1998). The idea of ‘crafting selves’ through play invokes Dorinne Kondo’s (1990) Foucauldian analysis of the disciplining of selves through organized physical activities. As non-Indian youth take up woodcraft and campcraft, we suggest, they are themselves crafted as American citizens with a naturalized relationship to the American landscape. This form of crafting American citizens exemplifies Aihwa Ong’s (1996) concept of ‘cultural citizenship’, in which dominant and subordinate categories of national belonging are produced and reproduced through everyday activities of inclusion and exclusion. Among these activities are sports – which, as Carrington and McDonald (2001: 12) observe, constitute ‘a site of contestation, resistance and struggle, whereby dominant ideologies are both maintained and challenged’. In this context, following Ziff and Rao (1997: 7), we treat ‘cultural appropriation’ as a complex process involving ‘strategies of authority and legitimation exercised over the processes of cultural transmission by dominant groups’ as well as strategies of resistance by subordinate groups. In ‘playing Indian’ the appropriation of ‘life-craft’ itself is at issue, as Native American forms of life are employed in the crafting of more generalized American identities. In recognizing the linkages among sports, crafted selves, and cultural citizenship as they have been played out in US youth organizations we engage the perspective of Ben Carrington (2004: 2), who writes, ‘As a form of physical culture, sport has a particular corporeal resonance in making visible those aspects of social life that often remain hidden and submerged in other domains.’ Like Carrington, we seek to ‘trace the interplay between ideologies of ‘‘race’’ and nation as they are embedded within sports cultures, and how sport itself operates to make ‘‘real’’ notions of racial difference and national belonging’. As we will see, notions of racial and cultural difference – specifically, indigenous difference – have long been employed in the physical culture of US youth organizations in order to realize non-Native claims to national belonging.

Strong and Posner

393

Crafting selves through appropriated sports: Woodcraft, canoeing, and archery The performance of Indianness in American youth organizations dates back to these organizations’ birth in the Progressive Era (1890–1920), when a circle of Euro-American social reformers was intensely concerned with what its members saw as the degeneracy, effeminacy, and artificiality of modern American urban culture (Schmitt, 1969). Looking for a way to strengthen American youth and reform their character, these pragmatic intellectuals turned to American Indian cultures, which in the tradition of the Noble Savage had long been represented as a repository of ‘natural’ virtues and vigor (White, 1976). The ‘recapitulation theory’ of psychologist and reformer G. Stanley Hall identified the ‘savagery’ and ‘playing proclivities’ of Indians with those of children (Rader, 1987). Hall argued in his influential volume, Adolescence, that the wilderness might be used as a kind of natural schoolroom for the democratic citizen: The child revels in savagery, and if its tribal, predatory, hunting, fishing, fighting, roving, idle, playing proclivities could be indulged in the country and under conditions that now, alas! seem hopelessly ideal, they could conceivably be so organized and directed as to be far more truly humanistic and liberal than all that the best modern school can provide. (Hall, 1904, vol. 1: x)

Youth reform was a family affair in the Progressive era. Euro-American reformers such as Edward Thompson Seton and his first spouse Grace Gallatin Seton, Daniel Carter Beard and his sister Lina Beard, and Dr Luther Gulick and his spouse Charlotte Vetter Gulick – together with Native Americans such as Dr Charles Eastman and his EuroAmerican spouse Elaine Goodale Eastman – developed a repertoire of physical and ceremonial practices that became the backbone of the youth development movement in the US. The Setons, Beards, Gulicks, and Eastmans were central to the growth of organized camping, and also active in the invention of an astonishingly large number of organizations and movements in the Progressive era. All shared a commitment to the progressive notion of learning through organized play, which Luther Gulick advocated in his monograph, A Philosophy of Play (1920). The first youth organization to imitate Native American forms of life – turning them into forms of organized play – was the Woodcraft Indians. This group was founded in 1901 by the Canadian naturalist, illustrator, and amateur ethnologist, Ernest Thompson Seton (Anderson, 1986; Witt, 2010). Initially aimed at building character in marginalized young men, by 1915 the Woodcraft movement included so-called ‘tribes’ of all ages and both sexes. Camping, canoeing, and archery were among the favored practices of the Woodcraft tribes (Figure 2). Seton’s ‘Indians’ would camp out in tepees, sometimes wearing Plains Indian clothing, and they could earn a series of ‘coups’, or honors, by completing challenges such as sleeping out for 60 consecutive nights or paddling a canoe for a thousand miles (Schmitt, 1969). The notion of the coup was imported from the indigenous Plains warrior’s practice of demonstrating bravery by coming close enough to an enemy to touch him.

394


Figure 2. Ernest Thompson Seton with an early group of Woodcraft Indians, circa 1903. Courtesy of Academy for the Love of Learning, Santa Fe, New Mexico

In addition to founding the Woodcraft Indians, Seton was an influential figure in the early years of the Boy Scouts of America. However, as a pacifist highly critical of industrial capitalism and urban life, he soon found that his political beliefs and antimilitarism brought him into conflict with others in the Boy Scouts who wished to model the American organization after the military, as Lord Baden-Powell had done in England, or after the frontiersman, as Daniel Beard preferred. The military and frontier models prevailed among the Boy Scouts of America and Seton, who had chaired the organization’s founding committee in 1910, resigned five years later. He subsequently devoted his attention to the more counter-cultural Woodcraft movement, which influenced countless American summer camps as well as the Boy Scouts’ own Order of the Arrow. This honorary brotherhood, which originated in a Philadelphia Boy Scout troop in 1915, was fully incorporated into the national Boy Scout organization in 1948 (BSA, 1950). Through the Order of the Arrow, with its appropriated names, totems, costumes, ordeals, and ceremonies, Seton’s Indian-centered approach to youth development has remained an important force in the Boy Scouts to this day (Deloria, 1998; Lassiter, 1998). Camp Fire Girls, the organization that Luther and Charlotte Gulick developed for young women, remained much closer to the Woodcraft movement than the Boy Scouts

Strong and Posner

395

(Buckler et al., 1961; Miller, 2007). A physician hailing from a well-known Congregational missionary family, Luther Gulick was somewhat more conventional in his political views than Seton (Dorgan, 1934). He began working as a physical education specialist for the YMCA in 1887, when that organization was in a period of developing what has aptly been called ‘muscular Christianity’ (Putney, 2001). This revitalized form of Christianity, the Victorian roots of which extend to the reformed English public school system (Mangan, 1981), emerged among American Protestants in the Progressive era as a way of countering what the movement’s adherents saw as the decline of both men and manly virtues in the church and a weakening of ‘American stock’ due to urbanization. In working with the YMCA Gulick addressed the Protestant suspicion of play by invoking the Old Testament. The familiar Biblical verse, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might’ (Deuteronomy 6:5), provided the basis for the YMCA’s slogan: ‘spirit upheld by body and mind’ (Nash, 1960: 60). Melding Old Testament tenets with New World aims, Gulick mapped body, mind and spirit onto an inverted equilateral triangle. Adopted as the YMCA’s official seal, the inverted red triangle enshrines the idea that a strong body and mind are fundamental to the development of the spirit (MacLeod, 1983). A man of relentless energy, Gulick had a marked talent for inventing organizations and traditions. In addition to conceiving the YMCA’s slogan and seal – which remain in use to this day – Gulick played a key role in James Naismith’s invention of the game of basketball, which was a response to the need for a competitive indoor sport to attract and maintain young men’s interest in the YMCA (Guttmann, 1994; Naismith and Baker, 1996). After leaving the YMCA to serve as the physical education director for the New York City public schools, Gulick co-founded the Playground Association of America, an organization that worked with Jane Addams of the settlement house movement to develop public playgrounds in urban areas. In all of his endeavors Gulick sought to encourage what he called the ‘wholesome use of leisure time’ (Putney, 2001: 36). Wholesomeness, for Gulick, had to do with what contributed to the development of character. As explained in Gulick’s Philosophy of Play: The individual is more completely revealed in play than in any one other way; and conversely, play has a greater shaping power over the character and nature of man than has any one other activity. A man shows what he really is when he is free to do what he chooses, and if a person can be influenced so that his highest aspirations – which are followed when he is free to pursue his ideas – are a gain, then character is being shaped profoundly. (Gulick, 1920: xiv)

As a social engineer, Gulick sought both to structure play and to restructure young selves through play. Like Seton and many of their contemporaries (Lears, 1981), Gulick deplored what he saw as the alienation and disenchantment of modern life, particularly in the city and the workplace. He worried that the increased employment of women and girls outside the home was destroying the social, emotional, and aesthetic fabric of life. Camp Fire Girls, which Luther and Charlotte Gulick founded in 1910, was designed to combat the corrupting influence of modernity by engaging girls in healthy activities in nature and re-enchanting domestic activities with the aura of the outdoors. Fire-making had a particularly strong symbolic resonance in Gulick’s design for the Camp Fire Girls

396


Figure 3. Luther H. Gulick demonstrates the Camp Fire Girls’ hand sign. Adapted with permission of Camp Fire USA from Wo-He-Lo: The Story of Camp Fire Girls (Buckler, Fiedler, and Allen 1961)

(Figure 3). Not only did the organization take its name and central symbol from the camp fire, but the ranks through which a girl passed as she demonstrated growing facility in campcraft – Wood Gatherer, Fire Maker, Torch Bearer – were named after camp roles associated with the warmth, light, and sociability of fire. These ranks were associated through symbolism with the social roles of Native American women (Deloria, 1998; Strong, 2006). It was not only young women who ‘played Indian’ in Camp Fire Girls. Luther Gulick was known in the organization by his ‘Indian’ name Timanous, or ‘Guiding Spirit’, while Charlotte Vetter Gulick was known as Hiiteni, an Arapaho name meaning ‘life most abundant’ (Anderson, 2001: 101). While Luther was the main theorist of the Camp Fire movement, Charlotte was a pioneer in organized camping for girls, serving as the first president of the National Association of Directors of Girls’ Camps. The Gulicks’ experimental summer camp for girls, Sebago-Wohelo, originated many of the appropriated traditions of the Camp Fire Girls (Rogers, 1915). Charlotte Gulick developed the organization’s watchword, ‘Wo-He-Lo’, a pseudo-Indian acronym for Work, Health, Love. She published manuals to help Camp Fire Girls choose their ‘Indian’ names and design their own Native-style ‘symbolgrams’ (Gulick, 1915). At camp and in Camp Fire publications she modeled the buckskin ceremonial gown and beaded headband that girls were encouraged to make in order to express their creativity and mark their achievements (Figure 4). It is largely through Charlotte Gulick’s efforts that Camp Fire, quite literally, offered American girls a gender-specific form of ‘crafting’ and ‘fashioning’ their selves through play (Miller, 2007; Strong, 2006).

Strong and Posner

397

Figure 4. Charlotte Vetter Gulick, dressed as ‘Hiiteni’, demonstrates fire-making. Adapted from Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 4th edn (Camp Fire Girls, 1914)

Fringed buckskin (or canvas) gowns, painted honor beads, and beaded headbands identified Camp Fire Girls with a romanticized Indian maiden. However, when Camp Fire Girls engaged in sports they generally wore bloomers, blouses, and kerchiefs (Figure 5) – a sign of the freedom and modernity of the ‘new woman’ in the Progressive era (Deacon, 1997; Miller, 2007). While campcraft invoked domesticity, hiking, archery, and canoeing involved girls in physical activities associated in the Progressive mind with the health, strength, and vigor of Native American women. The Gulicks and other reformers drew on ethnological literature as well as Native consultants in their appropriation of Native American traditions. Dr Charles Eastman or Ohiyesa, the Santee Sioux author, physician, and reformer, was highly influential in the spread of Native American forms of woodcraft, campcraft, and outdoor sports into the traditions of both the Boy Scouts of America and the Camp Fire Girls. One of the

398


Figure 5. Dr Charles Eastman (Ohiyesa) teaches girls archery at Camp Oahe. From 1916 brochure. Courtesy Jones Public Library, Amherst, Massachusetts

most prominent of the intellectuals known as ‘Indian Progressives’, Eastman recounted his traditional Santee boyhood in a series of popular autobiographical lectures, articles, and novels. In 1914 some of his writings were published in a single volume entitled Indian Scout Talks: A Guide for Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. Despite its inclusive subtitle, Indian Scout Talks was addressed mainly to boys, and promoted what Eastman called ‘Indian methods of physical training’ such as hunting, tracking, woodcraft, canoeing, and archery. According to Eastman the ‘school of savagery’, as he called it, was systematic and could be counted upon to produce true public servants. ‘Our Indian ‘‘Boy Scouts’’,’ Eastman noted, ‘are the immediate and unofficial guardians of our safety’ (1914: 187–8). Here, he explicitly identified the Boy Scouts of America with the young male Indian scouts appointed to guard a camp circle on the Plains. With respect to girls, Eastman insisted that, ‘contrary to popular opinion, our Indian girls and women are not mere drudges, but true feminine athletes, almost as alert as the men and frequently even more muscular’ (p. 106). On the basis of this indigenous precedent Eastman advocated vigorous physical exercise for Camp Fire Girls, including training in field and water versions of the Native American game of lacrosse. In fact, Eastman himself taught lacrosse, archery, and other Native American sports and games at Camp Oahe, the Eastman family’s summer camp (Figure 5).

Strong and Posner

399

Figure 6. Camp Fire Girls canoeing, captioned ‘Oh, we own the Lake!’ Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls (Rogers, 1915)

The sport of canoeing became a central activity at summer camps for girls, including the Gulick’s camp, Sebago-Wohelo (Figure 6). There, canoeing was surrounded with symbolic practices associated with Native Americans. Campers created their own ‘symbolgrams’ based on Native American designs and painted them on their paddles (Figure 7). While similar decorations may have once been used by Native Americans to attract fish and game, Camp Fire Girls employed them as a means of personal self-expression. At a time when many Eastern Woodlands tribes had lost their land base – and with it, the ability to subsist through hunting, fishing, and wild rice gathering – archery and canoeing became

400


Figure 7. Decorated canoe paddles, captioned ‘Every Camp Fire maiden has a symbol of her own’. Adapted from Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls (Rogers, 1915)

leisure activities for the daughters of those who had displaced Native Americans from the land. While cultural appropriation went hand in hand with the appropriation of property, the participation of Charles Eastman and other ‘Indian Progressives’ in these practices was part of an attempt to reform not only American character but American democracy itself (Hoxie, 2001). In teaching Euro-Americans about Native American cultures, Indian Progressives like Eastman hoped to create a more favorable environment for Native people – one that would include citizenship (not granted to Native Americans until 1924). In practice, however, the appropriation of Native American traditions often led Euro-Americans to think of themselves as the rightful heirs to and interpreters of a vanishing indigenous culture. In fact, this is one way that Euro-Americans developed a sense of ownership over the continent. As a caption to a photograph of costumed girls canoeing in a book about the Sebago-Wohelo camp puts it, ‘Oh, we own the Lake!’ (Rogers, 1915: 105). Ironically, young Indians were forbidden or discouraged by Euro-Americans from learning their own physical traditions at the very same time that organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls were being developed. The Progressive era saw the forcible removal of indigenous children to militaristic boarding schools intended to rid them of their so-called ‘savage’ ways and put them on the path to Christian civilization (Bloom, 2000; Lomawaima, 1993). Removed from their families and communities, Native American children were educated by Euro-American teachers and missionaries in boarding schools such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. At Carlisle and other boarding schools, Native girls were trained to be domestic

Strong and Posner

401

Figure 8. Junior football team, Haskell Institute, Lawrence, Kansas, early 1900s. Gettman Collection, Underwood & Underwood/Corbis Images

servants while their brothers were trained to be manual laborers. Students were drilled in Euro-American athletics: girls in gymnastic exercises intended to control bodies characterized as unruly; boys in team sports – baseball, football, basketball – meant to instill the spirit of competition thought to be absent in a tribal upbringing (Figure 8). The Progressive era’s construction of Indian children as wild and backward (‘undercivilized’) and White children as weak and degenerate (‘over-civilized’), led to distinct, asymmetrical forms of cultural appropriation and physical discipline. These, in turn, were associated with distinct forms of cultural citizenship. Social reformers engaged Euro-American youth in ‘playing Indian’ to promote their development as stronger citizenselves; meanwhile, Indian youth were enlisted in ‘playing sports’ to Americanize them, but as subordinate others.

From cultural appropriation to multiculturalism: Soccer in the Scouts Facing new social and cultural imperatives a century later, Camp Fire USA and the Boy Scouts of America are re-examining their heritage of cultural appropriation and mimesis. Seeking to remain relevant in a 21st-century context, these and other youth

402


development organizations are employing two strategies to recast themselves and their outdoor sporting activities. On the one hand, they are relinquishing the most obvious and controversial symbols of cultural appropriation and, on the other, they are recruiting diverse members through a strategy of multiculturalism. Changes in Boy Scout handbook covers illustrate the first strategy. Throughout the organization’s history, BSA handbooks have played a key role in codifying and disseminating the values and practices of the Scouts. The first edition, Seton and Baden-Powell’s Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-craft (1910), saw an average annual printing of 70,000 copies per year. By its fifth (1948–59) edition, the Boy Scouts of America was printing an annual average of half a million copies (Snowden, 2009). Given the publication’s popularity, importance and reach, handbook cover art, in concert with an analysis of BSA practice, offers a rough guide to the organization’s casting and re-casting of identity via scouting. As we have seen (Figure 1), the original (1910–11) edition featured nationalistic and quasi-militaristic themes associated with the international Boy Scout movement. On the cover a lone Euro-American boy in uniform stands on a promontory overlooking the sea, holding an American flag. The fifth (1949–59) and eighth (1972–9) editions, however, both hearken back to the organization’s strong symbolic association with a Native American past. The fifth edition appeared in four different covers, the last of which pictures three boys in overseas caps seated ‘Indian style’ around a campfire, whose blue-grey smoke rises behind them to produce a bare-chested Indian in full feather headdress. The image evokes a sense of fantasy and projection – a Native American imaginary as both a byproduct and guiding spirit of scouting. The cover of the eighth edition (1972–9) features a painting called ‘All Out for Scouting’. Here a group of mostly uniformed boys is pictured engaging in all manner of wilderness sports and activities associated with Native Americans – most prominently, hiking, archery and canoeing. (For online cover illustrations, see Ingram, 2005; Snowden, 2009.) In sharp contrast, the 11th edition of the BSA handbook (1998) features a cover in which imagery associated with Native Americans – and, indeed, boys themselves – is all but gone. An oak leaf and a bald eagle are overlain on the image of a snow-capped mountain landscape, traversed by a small group of backpackers presented in silhouette. In a similar vein, BSA’s Order of the Arrow abandoned its traditional Indianhead logo in 1998. ‘We will adopt a new logo: one focused on the Arrow rather than the Indian’, the BSA explained, noting that according to one Section Chief, ‘We are, after all, ‘‘THE ORDER OF THE ARROW’’, not the ‘‘Order of the Stylized Indianhead’’’ (OA, 1997–2010). Despite this symbolic change, members of the Order of the Arrow still engage in mimetic performances based on Native American dance and musical traditions (Lassiter, 1998; Strong, 2009). While the first strategy indicates a new sensitivity to the use of appropriated symbolism, it is only an initial step towards a transformed, more culturally inclusive organization. The multicultural strategy is more substantive – if also limited. Camp Fire USA, for example, is in the process of weeding out patently mimetic practices (the first postappropriative step) as well as re-branding the organization as culturally inclusive and reaching out to more diverse communities (the second, multicultural step). A coeducational organization since 1966, Camp Fire USA today encourages members to develop ceremonial garb based on their own ethnic and national backgrounds, and has developed family-based programs specifically aimed at minority and immigrant communities.

Strong and Posner

403

For example, the award-winning Jenny Lind Community Family Club in St Paul, Minnesota, helps Hmong families, ‘many low-income and recently emigrated from Southeast Asia, maintain their cultural roots while adapting to life in St. Paul’. Another recipient of an Annie E. Casey Family Strengthening Award, the Las Familias Unidas de Oak Cliff Community Family Club in Dallas, Texas, serves low-income Latino families, ‘with a focus on learning English and understanding American culture’ (AECF, 2004). Camp Fire’s historic mission of assimilating immigrants continues in these clubs, but in a multicultural form, without the unifying symbolism of appropriated Indianness. The most dramatic change from Camp Fire’s history of appropriating Native American culture may be the Rural Alaska Water Safety and Recreation Program of the Camp Fire USA Alaska Council (Figure 9). Camp Fire Girls reached Alaska in its earliest years, and Camp Fire USA remains strong there and elsewhere in the Northwest. The Alaska council’s Water Safety and Recreation Program offers two-week camps for Native Alaskan children and teens that focus on swimming and cold-water survival skills. ‘In some communities’, the council’s web site reports, ‘local village leaders collaborate with Camp Fire and conduct workshops on native culture and customs’ (CFUSA, 2005). The Rural Alaska Program evokes the collaboration between Charles Eastman and the Gulicks in the early years – as well as Charlotte Gulick’s emphasis on water sports as a way of imparting ‘fearlessness and bodily control’ (Rogers, 1915: 21). But now Native children and communities directly benefit from the Camp Fire program rather than serve as models. A more wide-reaching example of sports programming that directly targets ethnic minority communities is the Boy Scout of America’s Fútbol y Los Scouts (‘Soccer and Scouting’). In a climate of waning membership, competing leisure options for youth, and controversy over ‘girls, gays, and God’ (Mechling, 2001; Perry, 2008), BSA leaders have argued that the organization’s very survival is at stake if it can not ‘refashion [itself] as multi-cultural and modern’ – specifically, in order to reach Latino youth (Campo-Flores and Kliff, 2009). The recognition that scouting demographics are increasingly unsynchronized with national trends is central to the BSA’s concern. As the Scout’s website notes: ‘The U.S. Census Bureau reports that a quarter of children younger than five are Hispanic; in five years, they will be Boy Scout age. But today, only 100,000 of the three million registered members of Boy Scouts of America are Hispanic’ (BSA, 2009). Rick Cronk, the BSA’s past president, is quoted in Newsweek as saying: ‘We’re either going to figure out how we can be the most exciting and dynamic organization for Hispanic youth or we’re going out of business’ (Campo-Flores and Kliff, 2009). The Boy Scouts of America construes its outreach challenge in complex and somewhat contradictory ways – giving rise to a range of organizational programs and practices. Until recently, outreach to Latinos was mainly understood as a question of marketing and branding. The organization deployed demographic and market research to analyze recruitment opportunities and develop market-based campaign materials and programs. The BSA determined that it faced two principal challenges in reaching Hispanic/Latino would-be scouts: first, Latinos view scouting as the province of the wealthy and, second, Latinos lack a familial or community tradition of scouting (BSA, 2009, based on a 2006 Synovate US Diversity Markets Report). Responding to these challenges, the BSA has sought to bring Latinos into scouting through capitalizing on their participation in soccer.

404


Figure 9. Participants in Camp Fire USA’s Rural Alaska Water Safety and Recreation Program, 2005. Courtesy of Camp Fire USA, Alaska Council

In Soccer and Scouting, as in the better known ‘midnight basketball’ programs, sport is viewed instrumentally as a ‘hook’ whose ‘energies and excitement [are] redirected toward other, more socially significant ends’ (Hartmann, 2001: 355). Boy Scouts of America began a national pilot of Soccer and Scouting in 2005, seeking to involve seven- to ten-year-old Hispanic American/Latino boys in Cub Scouting (Figure 10). The campaign included the development of a multi-media website (www. soccerandscouting.org) replete with automatically launching sound files introducing the program with an ‘¡Olé!’ soundtrack backed by blaring horns, a cultural awareness supplement, and 30-second media spots and signage. The Soccer and Scouting website [http://www.soccerandscouting.org/faq/index.html] described the campaign in terms that equate soccer with the essence of Hispanic/Latino culture: Many councils have experienced tremendous growth recently in their Hispanic American/ Latino communities, especially among first-generation families from Mexico and Central and South America. The vast majority of these families view soccer as their national sport. Councils that have blended soccer with traditional Scouting programs in an effort to reach Hispanic youth have been successful in recruitment, program delivery, and retention. ‘It’s in our blood’ was the phrase one Latino professional Scout used to explain the success of Soccer and Scouting.

Strong and Posner

405

Figure 10. Scouts recite oath before soccer practice, December 2008. AP/Ben Margot

Using a common multicultural strategy invoking naturalized (‘in the blood’) cultural traits, Soccer and Scouting originally sought less to transform scouting than to preserve and expand it through inclusion and diversification. Consider the 2009 site, ‘Scouting – Vale La Pena’ (www.scoutingvalelapena.org), until recently the official Spanish-language website of Boy Scouts of America and a centerpiece of its public relations campaign. While the site promised to show how scouting is worthwhile (‘vale la pena’) to Hispanic families with a collection of bilingual (English/Spanish) literature, hyperlinked against a tomato-red backdrop and a Pre-Columbian motif, topics such as ‘Preserving the Hispanic Culture’ functioned as little more than catchphrases. The web site gave little indication that BSA was committed to social transformation beyond including soccer in its programs. In this respect, Soccer and Scouting was conceived in less ambitious terms than programs like Football for Peace that use sports as a means to social change through cross-cultural interaction (Sugden, 2006). More complex changes are underway at the Boy Scouts of America, however – changes that are in some tension with this tendency toward an essentialized multiculturalism. Revealing its awareness of the limitations of this approach, the BSA created a Hispanic Initiative Division and a National Hispanic Initiative Committee whose express goals are to ‘interweave Hispanic culture throughout the Scouting program and make this collaboration a solid fit’ (BSA, 2009). To engage Hispanic youth and their families in scouting, this division has undertaken a multi-pronged strategy that includes partnerships, fundraising, staff recruitment, communications and marketing, diversity training, and program development. Past president Rick Cronk reportedly began to focus

406


on a broader approach to Hispanic outreach after he ‘realized that just translating brochures into Spanish, or combining Cub Scouting with soccer, was not enough to meet the goal of doubling Hispanic membership by the group’s centennial in 2010’ (Barbassa, 2008). While it is too early to assess outcomes, the Hispanic Initiatives website represents the full range of Scouting opportunities. Soccer is offered as an activity, but so are hiking, climbing, camping, outdoor adventure, and sea scouting. Extensive Spanishlanguage and bilingual resources have been developed as well as a Spanish version of leaders’ training. An honor known as the ¡Scouting . . .Vale La Pena! Service Award has been developed to recognize individuals and organizations that create scouting opportunities for Hispanic American/Latino youth. Although originally rooted in the essentialist Fútbol y Los Scouts strategy, the Hispanic Initiative has branched out toward a fuller, more complex form of inclusion.

Towards interculturality? Whether they begin with changes in symbol or substance, traditional youth development organizations must be transformed in order to be vital and relevant in the 21st century. While American youth have always been diverse, the organizations that serve youth have historically sought to consolidate a singular, homogenized American identity. From archery to woodcraft, from basketball to soccer, sports have consistently been at the center of a succession of strategies to craft American citizens. As we have seen, youth development organizations have structured sports and selves through practices of appropriation, assimilation, and multiculturalism. Today’s multiculturalism, like yesterday’s appropriation and assimilation, has its limits. One criticism of multiculturalism as a social and political strategy for managing diversity is that it encourages the insularity of cultural groups (what Robert Putnam calls ‘bonding relations’) rather than solidarity among people from different identity groups (or ‘bridging relations’) (Eisenberg, 2007; Putnam, 1993). Another criticism is that a multicultural strategy brings people of different cultures into the mainstream primarily on the terms of the dominant culture (Povinelli, 2002). Both tendencies – towards insularity and towards cultural hegemony – may be seen in programs such as Soccer and Scouting and ethnically specific Camp Fire clubs. Recruiting Latinos, Alaskan Natives, Hmong, and other ethnic groups into youth development organizations by responding to their distinctive interests and needs is certainly an important step towards making these organizations more genuinely diverse. However, the vision of cultural interweaving and collaboration offered by the BSA’s National Hispanic Initiative Committee requires a more far-reaching approach – one that is less akin to multiculturalism than to interculturality (Posner, 2008). Moving beyond multiculturalism, an intercultural vision requires that youth development organizations transform themselves into settings in which cultural pluralism is valued at all levels – from the clubhouse to the boardroom. What is needed is not only programs that serve ethnically diverse youth in their own communities but also opportunities for inclusion that give rise to meaningful exchanges among cultural groups. Whatever the activity – swimming or canoeing, hiking or soccer – ethnically and racially diverse youth need ways to ‘team up’ that provide them with an enhanced sense of the

Strong and Posner

407

values and strengths that make up diverse scouts and scouting families. Today’s challenge is to engage youth in ways that value their diversity, not because this means more kids in clubs but because intercultural relationships prepare youth for citizenship in a culturally complex nation and world. Inevitably youth development concerns itself with questions of identity and belonging. In putting selves in play, youth organizations have the chance either to reinforce existing social relations and hierarchies, or to take part in transforming them. Acknowledgments An early version of this article was presented at the 2008 conference on ‘Sports, Race, and Ethnicity: Building a Global Understanding’ at the University of Technology, Haymarket Campus, Sydney, Australia. We are grateful to Daryl Adair for organizing a stimulating conference, and to Daryl, David Rowe, Gill Rogers, Neil Sentance, and two anonymous referees for their help with this article.

References Anderson HA (1986) The Chief: Ernest Thompson Seton and the Changing West. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Anderson JD (2001) The Four Hills of Life: Northern Arapaho Knowledge and Life Movement. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) (2004) Camp Fire USA Minnesota Council. Available at: http://www.aecf.org/MajorInitiatives/MoreCaseyInitiatives/FAMILIESCOUNT/FamilyStren gtheningAwards/2004Honorees.aspx (accessed 17 March 2010). Barbassa J (2008) Boy Scouts see Hispanics as key to boosting ranks. Associated Press, 26 December. Available at: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Boy Scouts see Hispanics as key to boosting ranks-a01611752203 (accessed 18 March 2010). Bloom J (2000) To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Boy Scouts of America (BSA) (1950) Order of the Arrow, A National Brotherhood of Scout Honor Campers: Handbook for Lodge Officers and Members. New Brunswick, NJ: Boy Scouts of America. Boy Scouts of America (BSA) (2009) Hispanic initiatives. Available at: http://www.scouting.org/ HispanicInitiatives.aspx (accessed 18 March 2010). Buckler H, Fiedler MF, and Allen MF (1961) Wo-He-Lo: The Story of the Camp Fire Girls, 1910– 1960. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Camp Fire Girls (1914) The Book of the Camp Fire Girls, 4th rev. edn. New York: National Headquarters. Camp Fire USA (CFUSA) (2005) Alaska Council/Rural Alaska Program. Available at: http:// www.campfireak.org/RURAL.HTML (accessed 18 March 2010). Campo-Flores A, Kliff S (2009) Campfire questions: Like any major organization catering to kids, the Boy Scouts of America needs to attract young Latinos in order to survive. Newsweek, 26 January. Available at: http://www.newsweek.com/id/180046 (accessed 18 March 2010). Carrington B (2004) Introduction: Race/nation/sport. Leisure Studies 23(1): 1–3. Carrington B, McDonald I (2001) Race, Sport, and British Society. London: Routledge.

408


Coombe RJ (1998) The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deacon D (1997) Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Deloria PJ (1998) Playing Indian. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Dorgan EJ (1934) Luther Halsey Gulick, 1865–1918. New York: Teacher’s College. Eastman CA (Ohiyesa) (1914) Indian Scout Talks: A Guide for Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls. Boston, MA: Little, Brown, and Co. Reprint. Eisenberg A (2007) Equality, trust, and multiculturalism. In: Kay F, Johnston R (eds) Social Capital, Diversity, and the Welfare State. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 67–94. Gulick CV (Hiiteni) (1915) A Book of Symbols for Camp Fire Girls. New York: Camp Fire Outfitting Co. Gulick LH (1920) A Philosophy of Play. New York, Boston, and Chicago: C. Scribner’s Sons. Guttmann A (1994) Games and Empires: Modern Sports and Cultural Imperialism. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall GS (1904) Adolescence and its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education, 2 vols. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Hartmann D (2001) Notes on midnight basketball and the cultural politics of recreation, race, and at-risk urban youth. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 25(4): 339–371. Hoxie FE (ed.) (2001) Talking Back to Civilization: Indian Voices from the Progressive Era. Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin’s. Ingram W (2005) The Call of the Wild: Character Building and the Boy Scout Handbook. A rare book school exhibition, the University of Virginia. Available at: http://www.rarebookschool. org/2005/exhibitions/bshb.shtml (accessed 19 March 2010). Kondo D (1990) Disciplined selves. In: Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 76–118. Lassiter LE (1998) The Power of Kiowa Song. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Lears TJ (1981) No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon Books. Lomawaima KT (1993) Domesticity in the federal Indian schools: The power of authority over body and mind. American Ethnologist 20: 227–240. MacLeod DI (1983) Building Character in the American Boy: The Boy Scouts, YMCA, and their Forerunners, 1870–1920. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Mangan JA (1981) Athleticism in the Victorian and Edwardian Public School. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mechling J (2001) On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Miller SA (2007) Growing Girls: The Natural Origins of Girls’ Organizations in America. New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press. Naismith J, Baker WJ (1996) Basketball: Its Origin and Development. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Reprint. Nash JB (1960) Luther H. Gulick. Journal of Health, Physical Education and Recreation, April. Ong A (1996) Cultural citizenship as subject-making: Immigrants negotiate racial and cultural boundaries in the United States. Current Anthropology 37: 737–762.

Strong and Posner

409

Order of the Arrow (OA) (1997–2010) Why the OA logo was changed. Order of the Arrow, Boy Scouts of America. Available at: http://www.oa-bsa.org/qanda/qa-07.htm (accessed 18 March 2010). Perry R (2008) On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts are Worth Fighting For. Macon, GA: Stroud and Hall. Posner L (2008) Hold on: Changing course to raise graduation rates. IDRA Newsletter 35, no. 9 (October): 3–4, 10–12. San Antonio, TX: Intercultural Development Research Association. Povinelli EA (2002) The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Putnam R (1993) Making Democracy Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putney C (2001) Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 1880–1920. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Rader BG (1987) The recapitulation theory of play: motor behaviour, moral reflexes and manly attitudes in urban America, 1880–1920. In: Mangan JA, Walvin J (eds) Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940. New York: St Martin’s Press, 123–134. Rogers E (1915) Sebago-Wohelo Camp Fire Girls. Battle Creek, MI: Good Health Publishing. Schmitt PJ (1969) Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America. New York: Oxford University Press. Seton ET, Baden-Powell RSS (1910) Boy Scouts of America: A Handbook of Woodcraft, Scouting, and Life-craft. New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., for the Boy Scouts of America. Snowden J (2009) The Boy Scout Handbook, 1910-Today. A Comparison of the Contents from the 1910 ‘Original’ Edition through Today’s Twelfth Edition, 4th edn. Available at: http://www. troop97.net/bshb1.htm (accessed 17 March 2010). Staurowsky E (2006) Making sense of the American Indian mascot issue. In: Spickard Prettyman S, Lampman B (eds) Learning Culture through Sports: Exploring the Role of Sports in Society. Lanham, MD, Toronto and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Education, 133–148. Strong PT (2004) The mascot slot: Cultural citizenship, political correctness, and pseudo-Indian sports symbols. Journal of Sport and Social Issues 28(1): 79–87. Strong PT (2006) ‘To light the fire of our desire’: Primitivism in the Camp Fire Girls. In: Kan S, Strong PT (eds) New Perspectives on Native North America: Cultures, Histories, and Representations. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 474–488. Strong PT (2009) Cultural appropriation and the crafting of racialized selves in American youth organizations: Towards an autoethnography. Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies 9(2): 197–213. Sugden J (2006) Teaching and playing sport for conflict resolution and co-existence in Israel. International Review for the Sociology of Sport 41(2): 221–240. White H (1976) The Noble Savage theme as fetish. In: Chiapelli F, Allen MJB, Benson RL (eds) First Images of America, Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 121–135. Witt DL (2010) Ernest Thompson Seton: The Life and Legacy of an Artist and Conservationist. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith. Ziff B, Rao PV (1997) Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.