Pretending To Be Native American

The only thing I dislike about the Scout Camp we went to this year (beside the fact that there's a lot of hiking up and down hills to get around camp) is a ceremony that the Staff performs late in the week. This ceremony borrows heavily from what I can only assume is Native American tradition. I haven't seen much of any genuine Native American ceremonies, so I have no idea how closely this ceremony mirrors theirs, but I strongly suspect that this ceremony was entirely composed of falsehoods and fabrication.

The ties the Boy Scouts of America claims to have to Native American culture has always been my least favorite part of the organization. BSA and the ceremony teach good ideals, but they package those ideals in references to a culture that we are not a part of. We are not Native Americans. We probably don't do a very good job of respecting Native Americans when we borrow from their traditions to spice up our campfire stories. And any campfire story that starts with the phrase "Many moons ago" might as well have started with the phrase "Once upon a time" for how truthful I expect them to be. Sure, we're teaching young men how to be good men, but we lie to them when we do it. And this from an organization whose members' first tenet is to be trustworthy.

My point is that we don't need to pretend to be Native American to be interesting. We can capture the boys' attention in other ways. At the final campfire, one member shared a true story of how he saved a person from serious injury using skills he had learned at Scout Camp six years earlier. It was a powerful message. I'm sure we can find other true, inspiring stories about Scouts who used their skills and their virtues to accomplish good and great things. And we can do so without wearing leather and feather costumes that only cover half of our bodies.

I respect the Boy Scouts of America for teaching young men to act with honor and integrity, but it pains me to see so many leaders of Scouting organizations discard their dignity and act in a way that betrays the ideals of Scouting. I believe that leaders should lead by example, and by dressing up as Native Americans and telling tall tales, we're not setting very good examples of how honest men should behave.

Yet, as with almost every fault I decry on my blog, I have no room to talk. I make-believe to inspire myself to be righteous. The leaders of that Scout Camp may not be Native Americans, but I'm not a Paladin, either. However, I never seriously claim to be a Paladin, and I think that sets me apart from the Scout leaders who performed that ceremony a few nights ago. Whenever I claim to be a Paladin, which is rarely, I only ever mean it in a figurative sense. I have never tried to convince anyone that I literally am a Paladin. But I think some Scout leaders have dishonestly attempted to make young men believe that they really were Native Americans, and in my mind, that is completely unacceptable. Playing fictional roles in skits is fine, but actually pretending to be something you're not takes the idea of fiction a little bit too far.

Maybe I'm just bitter about this because I think that the leaders of impressionable young men should hold themselves to high standards of conduct. Maybe I'm just being a stick in the mud or a wet blanket. Maybe I'm drawing too fine a line between fiction and dishonesty. But I personally don't plan on participating in any supposedly Native American ceremonies organized by members of the Boy Scouts of America. It's possible that there's not actually anything wrong with them, but they seem dishonest and unnecessary to me.