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Native Americans to Boy Scouts: Stop Plundering Our Past

Cecily Hilleary

   WASHINGTON - This year, the Boy Scouts of America's honor society, the
   Order of the Arrow, instituted a new policy: Scouts will no longer be
   allowed to dress up as "Indians" and incorporate Native American motifs
   into two of the order's more important ceremonies.

   But in spite of complaints from tribes across the country, Scouts
   continue to dress in "Redface," a term some use to describe the wearing
   of feathers and warpaint by non-Native Americans.

   Charm and romance

   In 1902, a Connecticut naturalist named Ernest Thompson Seton
   established an outdoor youth club called the "League of Woodcraft
   Indians," seen as part of a greater back-to-nature movement in America
   in reaction to industrialization.

   As Seton put it in his Woodcraft [1]guidebook, "those live longest who
   live nearest to the ground, that is, who live the simple life of
   primitive times, divested, however, of the evils that ignorance in
   those times begot."

References

   1. http://etsetoninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Birch_Bark_Roll_of_Woodcraft.pdf

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