The Fundamental Things”

Camp Fire Girls was a popular and influential girls’ group noteworthy for its celebration, appropriation, and fabrication of Native lore. This paper will explore how and why Camp Fire Girls played Indian in the movement’s inaugural decade (1910 to 1920). It will argue that Camp Fire Girls was an anti-modernist response to cultural and social anxieties that industrialization, urbanization, and modern technology were making youth weak, women abandon the home, and Americans more generally forsake the wholesome countryside for myriad immoral influences of cities. It will also show that Camp Fire Girls played Indian in order to improve on, rather than escape from, modernity. Indian play reinforced in Camp Fire Girls a sense of their superiority as a more evolved race, made housework appealing to women, and taught girls how to participate in an urban world in ways that did not challenge the integrity of the “fundamental things”: their femininity, whiteness, and American character

Aesthetics · Appropriation · Art · Economic growth · Ethnology · Femininity · Industrialisation · Modernity · Modernization theory · Political science · Sociology · Summer camp · Urbanization · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society