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“Amidst the 2015 National Order of the Arrow Conference on campus this week, students have taken issue to the Boy Scout’s use of Native American culture and imagery.
Anthropology senior Hayley Cook and alumnus Dan Grenzicki set out to paint the Rock on Farm Lane at 11 p.m. on Thursday. Their goal was to raise awareness of Native American cultural appropriation onset by the Boy Scouts of America. The scouts, however, had a different view on their painting.
“It turned into this whole other thing because every single group of Boy Scouts that we saw would yell at us in some way,” Cook said, who is also an intern for the Native Americans Institute and Mohawk, Iroquois Nation ethnicity from upstate New York. “It ranged from asking if I had pegs on my bike, could they get on, to calling me a weird-looking boy because I have short hair — just crazy things that are not even relevant.”
Cook said her and Grenzicki painted the Rock until 3 a.m., and the scouts remained present throughout.
“They went out of their way to sit at the rock in the middle of the night, after their camp schedule, to heckle us at the Rock. We were like, ‘this is like a camp, don’t they have stuff to do in the morning or curfews?’ I’ve worked in the dorms. I know camps do curfews or else they get in trouble,” Cook said.”
– State News, Students paint the Rock discouraging Boy Scout use of Native American culture on campus .
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Download the 18″x24″ poster (.pdf), Indian Country 52 #32 – Boy Scouts of Appropriation.
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Indian Country 52
Indian Country 52 is a weekly project by David Bernie that uses the medium of posters that promote issues and stories in Indian Country.
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This work by David Bernie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. You may download, share, and post the images under the condition that the works are attributed to the artist.
