Indigenous peoplesSome camps are making amends for a long history of cultural appropriation – including made-up, ‘Native-sounding’ names – and some are not
“I’m still learning the new names,” said Holly Mueller Hecht. She walks past the rows of cabins, then nods toward one. “But that one is named after a plant now.”
Until August 2020, the 18 camper bunks at Camp Onas – a coed sleepaway camp in Ottsville, Pennsylvania, where Hecht is one of the directors – all had names either derived from Native American tribes and languages, or constructed to sound as if they were.
There was Seminole and Playwicki; Tulpehocken and Tinicum; Wissahickon and Comanche – a mishmash of cultures, not to mention of fact and fiction.
The names, most of them chosen decades ago, reflect a long tradition in North American summer camps. Every year, millions of kids are dropped off by their parents in the woods for weeks at a time, at institutions that have appropriated Indigenous names – or their made-up equivalents – and co-opted “native” practices into camp culture, such as powwows, totem poles, war paint, certain camp songs and “tribes”.
It was the same at Camp Onas – at least until last August, when staff and older campers collaborated on a plan to rename the bunks: stars and constellations for the oldest bunks, plants for the youngest. The new names include Sundrop and Orion, Sycamore and Lyra, Bluestem and Silverleaf.
Onas isn’t alone. Across the continent, the camping community is at last slowly grappling with Native American cultural appropriation. Many camps have begun the long work of reparations, starting – though not ending – with renaming. In February, Camp Kummoniwannago in Waterloo, Canada, changed its name after requests from the local Indigenous community. In 2021, Camp Iroquois in New York changed its name to Camp Evergreen. In February, at the national American Camp Association (ACA) conference, renaming was on a lot of camp professionals’ lips, said presenter Andrew Corley.
“We get approached by other camps like, ‘Hey, is it OK what we’re doing with headdresses and totem poles? And we have these cabin names … ’” said Corley, who is head of the Sioux YMCA, the only YMCA located on a Native American reservation.
“They don’t have an ‘Irish’ cabin, why would they have a ‘Lakota’ cabin?” added Ryan Gagnon, an assistant professor at Clemson University who presented alongside Corley in a session about the global Indigenous youth summit.
Not everybody agrees. Many camps still accredited by the ACA dress their campers in Native American outfits, or split campers into “tribes” – often with names that belong to Native American communities such as Apache, Comanche or Cherokee. Although the ACA does offer resources for camps looking to make changes to their names or practices, they don’t provide specific guidelines for camps to follow, nor do they have rules that prohibit appropriation.
Indeed, some camps are actively deciding not to change. In 2020, alumni of Camp Merri-Mac in North Carolina started a petition to discontinue the use of the names Choctaw, Iroquois and Seminole, which are part of a “tribal” system into which campers are “initiated”. But the petition failed to reach its goal of 500 signatures, and although the director of Merri-Mac’s brother camp, Camp Timberlake, told the Guardian that both camps discontinued their “Native American motif” in 2021, the camp’s website still refers to its “Indian tribes”.
It matters, say campaigners, because American summer camps are a cultural force. Across the US there are roughly 15,000 summer camps serving a whopping 26 million campers each year. “Outside of public school, more American kids experience summer camp than any other institution,” said Dr Paul Hutchinson, who teaches at Boston University and co-curated a museum exhibit on New Hampshire summer camps.
Both day camps and sleepaway camps are thriving. Some specialize (for example, science camp, theater camp or space camp) but many simply focus on being outside, creating community and having fun. Some camps are single sex, others are co-ed; they run anywhere from one week to eight.
Summer camps were originally designed in the late 19th century to teach wealthy boys, in an increasingly urban nation, how to survive in nature. But the parents being marketed to often didn’t have much experience with wilderness either.
“The only thing they really know about this idea of wilderness was what was romanticized in Longfellow and in James Fenimore Cooper and Mark Twain, so that’s really what they’re crafting,” Hutchinson noted. “You look at a lot of the names of camps and the names of their traditions and they’re right out of The Song of Hiawatha.”
By the mid-20th century, this idealized “natural” way of life – often represented by appropriating Native tropes – was a hallmark of the camp experience. “In the postwar years, when Westerns are all the thing, [camps] want to have powwows, they want to have these bonfires and dress up like Native people, and have these legends that connect them to a distant past. It’s all romanticism,” Hutchinson said. “It ended up becoming caricature.”
Not least because, with 574 tribes officially recognized in the US, the appropriation of Native cultures also means blending and obfuscating those very cultures. “Native Americans are not a one-stop shop,” said Evanlene Melting Tallow of Washington State University’s Na-ha-shnee Steam Health Summer Institute, a summer program for high schoolers with Indigenous ancestry. “We have different languages, different customs, different religion.”
In the late 90s and early 00s, I was first a camper and then a counselor at Onas. I remember no discussion that my home bunk one summer, Cree, was the name of a people native to the continent’s northeast; or that Chippewanna, where I spent another summer, was a twist on Chipewyan, a tribe from northern Canada. I just remember the childhood pride of belonging to a certain bunk.
“In our names, the theme was: sounds Indigenous,” recalls Dex Coen Gilbert, the camp’s assistant director. “It’s kind of a bummer that for such a long time it was that.”
One of the camps that has made changes is Camp IHC in Pennsylvania, formerly called Indian Head Camp. The process wasn’t easy, says its director, Lauren Rutkowski. “We changed everything. The name, the logo. You’re talking about millions of dollars,” she said.
But, she adds, “If you really are in alignment with this being harmful to Indigenous people … [then] it’s not ours to use.”
Many former campers disagreed with that decision, she says. “Camp is something that people hold very dear to their heart – it’s part of their identity,” Rutkowski says. “To have the name questioned in terms of: is it appropriate? Is it something that reflects the values of what camp is supposed to be? Or is it something that is not in alignment with that? That was very hard for people to hear.”
Tradition is a big factor. “In some cases, you’ve got five generations of a family that have gone to the same camp on the shores of the same lake in the same mountains and done the same ritual. There’s not a lot of things in American culture that you can say that your great-great-grandfather did just like you,” Hutchinson said.
“A lot of people are reacting to what became their family history and traditions, and not wanting to question it – but also not really wanting to go deeper, to realize who is being silenced in that process.”
Cheryl Ellenwood, a citizen of the Nez Perce Nation of Idaho and a Navajo, has worked with the ACA on issues of appropriation in the past. “When camps engage in activities such as giving campers ‘Indian’ names or hold ceremonies that mock Native Americans, they are teaching campers that this type of behavior is acceptable and reinforce the notion that Indigenous peoples are not equals,” she said.
She agrees that change is difficult. “These activities are not easy to get rid of,” she said. “Acts of cultural appropriation are seen as part of the nostalgic camp culture, especially with the generational aspect of some campers becoming staff or board members later in life.”
But according to those at the forefront of this fight, change is both possible – and necessary. “Names are powerful and matter,” said Thurson. “We joked in our session that if you have to ask if something is OK, it’s definitely not. Maybe your camp doesn’t have a totem pole at the entrance but are they doing an “Apache” relay? It’s important to continuously engage with the cultural appropriation audit on a spectrum.”
There are also opportunities for camps to incorporate Native American culture in ways that are respectful, says Dr Lonnie Nelson, assistant director of special projects at the Na-ha-shnee Steam Health Institute. “Being Cherokee, I can totally see Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, or the Eastern Band folks, putting on a summer camp where they teach kids how to play stickball – that’s one of the games that’s traditional to our tribe. If that were being taught by a person from the tribe who has expertise in that area … I don’t see any problem with sharing that knowledge with anybody.”
Back at my old camp, Onas, they’re waiting for the first campers to arrive at bunks with brand-new names.
It’s just a first move, according to Coen Gilbert, towards a more “right relationship with the people who used to live here and who still live throughout the country. We’re far from done – but this was a big baby step.”
“I think there’ll be slip-ups and some people will struggle with remembering the new names,” Hecht said. “But then we’ll find out it’s surprisingly easy.”
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