Sunday, November 29, 2009

Speculation: What crazy things might I do for my children one day?


My dad sent this to me a little while ago, and I knew eventually I’d have to share it :)

Some of you ladies out there may have memories of girl scouts or brownies or something else.. Not I. No, I have memories of hanging out with my dad being an Indian Princess.

I have no idea if this program still exists. I think it was through the YMCA, and I’m pretty sure it would offend a lot of people if it is still going on (at least when I tell people here about it, their eyes usually get real big :). We had a tribe, the Huron Tribe. We met on a regular basis, daughters and dads, and had various activities we did at those meetings – including taking the wampum. We could do things on our own to earn ourselves patches on our vests, feathers on our walking sticks, and I think feathers in our headbands as well. We had weekend trips away to camp and canoe (most of my memories of this involve being very wet and cold.. so wet in fact that once instead of trying to maneuver peeing in the woods, I just decided to pee my pants, because what difference did it make, really?), and had competitions with award ceremonies and everything. In fact, I think we even had feasts.. The Feast of the Blue Moon perhaps? My memory is faulty..

Obviously, the whole point was to foster a good relationship between dads and their daughters. To get them out doing things together, especially in the case of dads that worked during most of the week. At the same time we got to learn more of the history and culture of Native Americans (although I’m not sure how much we really appreciated that at the time, being 8 years old and all) and we got to do fun activities with other girls and all of our dads.

If you were really dedicated, you could continue on into 4th grade with these activities and progress to be a Trail Blazer. Yeah. We weren’t that dedicated.. Something about Dad’s vest getting so full of patches after doing this with his two girls, and needing to leave space for when Mitchell joined Indian Guides..

(Disclaimer: I made that excuse up, though I’m sure his was equally convincing :)

You can see in the picture we were kind of delinquents anyway, not wearing our headdresses and all.. And, I think there was some rule about how Indians didn’t really perm their hair and were forbidden from wearing oversized t-shirts. Disney actually called and said they would have let me be Pocahontas if it weren’t for that. So close.. and yet so far.

(After I wrote this post, I did some further research.. I found the website of a tribe in Ohio that I thought you might enjoy seeing.. you know to give you a tiny taste of the amazing-ness of Indian Princesses. Of course, unless you were one, you’ll never really know what it was like to be a princess..)

3 comments:

  1. Dear Scampering Bunny,
    I believe it was the feast of the snow moon. Ah, the memories. I think that may have been the weekend got deathly ill. I'm thankful that we were able to participate.
    Soaring Eagle

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  3. Wow. Yeah. This definitely may offend some people. But, that was then. This is now.

    LOVE your Dad calling you Scampering Bunny in his comment!

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