Cardboard Indians

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, board game makers depicted the West as a dangerous place and portrayed Native Americans as both violent savages and children of nature. Early game companies marketed their games by playing up the excitement of the Wild West to appeal to children, while emphasizing the historic, educational, and patriotic aspects of their games to appeal to parents. In this context, games provided a means to simplify complex ideas about manifest destiny, frontiers, identity, and violence in ways that young children could understand. The rise of Civil Rights activism in the 1960s and 1970s splintered the ways game companies portrayed Native Americans and the West. After the 1970s, game manufacturers attempted to appeal to a diverse set of markets in North America and Europe by portraying the West as a place of savage spectacles, as a place of historic interactions, and as a place devoid of conflict or violence. These competing portrayals emphasize the continued importance of the West to American conceptions of identity and the importance of game makers in creating meaningful arguments about the past that help to bridge the world of adults with the world of children.

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