By Andrew Freiman

Recreation: “the action or process of creating something again”

1.

The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language says that recreation is “[a]musement or diversion which gives enjoyment; refreshment of the strength of spirits, as after toil; anything providing entertainment or relaxation” (801). The Oxford Dictionary is more to the point, saying simply “[a]ctivity done for enjoyment when one is not working”, while quickly adding the second definition “the action or process of creating something again” as well as  “a re-enactment or simulation of something”.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA

The term had a steady if shallow trend during the 19th century only to explode at the turn of the 20th as a reaction to growing trends in employment, labor, a slowly rising class consciousness, and the notion of leisure time–that free stuff, outside the confines of work, that allow some folks to further define who they are. Not just a tailor, but one who plays handball. Not just an investor, but one that enjoys motoring on the weekends and holidays. There were of course other uses of the word that sought to help individuals internally, to heal their bodies or bring peace to their minds. A midcentury anthology puts it this way: “Recreation is frequently used to help attain other ends such as healing the sick, rehabilitating the injured, and helping the delinquent” (Brightbill 51). Brightbill continues to stress his case by noting that “[a]s far as individual need is concerned, recreation is often the only outlet for self-realization and self-discovery. It gives to human beings the chance to create, to express, to serve, and to gain, and results in personality growth and development” (52). So, recreation is a reaction to labor, a utilization of free time, a way to define the self, even heal the self, maybe even foundational to the self in general. We cannot forget the second definition offered by the Oxford Dictionary “the action or process of creating something again” and “a re-enactment or simulation of something” these two ideas, related as they are, will become useful later on.

We should stress what may already be obvious, recreation at the turn of the 20th century was something reserved for a specific group of Americans. White, some degree above the economic nomination of “lower class,” often male citizens enjoyed this form of self-realization. Others worked more often at more difficult jobs, or were banned from or physically and culturally removed from the places in which recreation could happen. Pools and parks were segregated. Racist practices on public roadways made motoring while a person of color difficult if not dangerous. Thanks to the Dawes Act of 1887 National Forests were cut out from already existing, legally documented tribal reservations. By the 1930’s “the amount of land owned by Indians had fallen to 46 million acres, a reduction of ⅔. Some tribes lost 95% of their reservation lands because of the Dawes Act” (McAvoy 82). These lands became mythologized in a national American identity attained through the recreational outlets of hiking, camping, and canoeing, among others. Non-white communities found it difficult not only to find the time for the processes of recreation, but also found it difficult if not impossible to find the space for such things to occur.

For many in Native American communities the idea of leisure time or recreation in general might not directly square with the larger understanding of the terms. This is because there is often little difference between work and leisure activities (McAvoy 81). Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be much fragmentation of the human experience into distinct categories such as work, leisure, family, and spiritual. Instead, many of the activities, especially those that may be called leisure activities like hunting, fishing, and berry picking, seem to be wrapped up in a close association with sustenance, gathering activities, leisure, family, culture and tradition. Many of the activities American Indians participate in are closely related to traditional activities Indian people have done for centuries (81).

Ojibwe family, circa 1913 (labeled “Typical Indians” by the non-Native photographer). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division LOT 12880 [P&P;]

When removed from their historical lands, when their government appointed lands are further reduced, when their foodways are disrupted by logging, white settlers, the draining of swamps or the rerouting of rivers, what then happens to the the re-creative tasks Native American populations depend on?

A few news clippings from the late 19th century may give us an answer, and later may lead us to new possibilities in the present moment. Here we will focus on canoeing as it was something very quickly and successfully appropriated from Indigenous communities by whites, who utilized it for recreational activities ignoring the concerns of sustenance, family, culture, and tradition. On June 19th, 1880 the New York Times ran an article titled “The Canoe ‘Boom’” that explained the new recreational craze of the moment. The author quickly informs us that “Canoeing had been for some years a very popular sport in England before it was introduced into the United States,” ignoring the Indigenous communities of North America which created the craft and taught whites how to pilot them. Later the writer doubles down on this erasure by stating that it was only 8 years before, in 1872, that canoeing “became naturalized [in New England] by the founding of the New-York Canoe Club,” as if it too, like all of white America, was a recent immigrant from the Old World. The author makes a stark distinction between Indigenous birch bark canoes and those used by the white canoers of New England, otherwise known as “the canoe of civilization”; in reality it isn’t that the canoe didn’t exist before 1872, but that the canoe, being so “primitive,” didn’t matter at all, was entirely inconsequential.

Frank Yielfs & Geo. Newhouse of U[…] Canoe Club at Regatta, [8/23/24]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-F8- 31916 [P&P]

Of this brand new world of American Canoeing we are happily informed that “within the last two years [1888-1890] the number of American canoeists has grown to very respectable dimensions. There are now five flourishing canoe clubs, and a half dozen builders who find their time fully occupied in building canoes”. In Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe Association, Jessica Dunkin makes it very plain how the early canoe clubs were indebted to Indigenous realities:

Members of the ACA appropriated Indigenous technologies and practices as they camped and canoed at the annual meets. Occasionally, they acknowledged their debt to Indigenous designers, but mostly they claimed their boats and styles of camping bore little resemblance to the ‘crank’ craft and rudimentary living arrangements of ‘Indians,’ both having been improved, in their eyes, by modern materials and methods. The canoeists did not just benefit from the ingenuity of Indigenous peoples, they were also beneficiaries of the colonial system that sought to contain, assimilate, and eradicate the continent’s original inhabitants. In particular, colonial policies and structures worked to ensure that white folks had places to play that were free of Indigenous peoples (9).

“Tenting on Historic Ground” (New York Times, July 15th, 1894) retells this story in ways that accentuate the violence of this cultural appropriation and cultural erasure. In describing the area where the American Canoe Club is held, the article describes the first encounter between Native populations and Hendrik Hudson and his crew of explorers  in 1609. Anchored off Verplanck’s Point on the  Hudson River,

Hudson was visited by some of the Indians, who were struck with wonder at the superiority of his craft to their own canoes and marveled at the peculiar weapons of the strangers. One of the Indians lingered in a canoe beside the vessel with evidently thievish intent, and, although warned away, watched his opportunity, and, climbing up the rudder into the cabin window, stole a pillow of a few articles of wearing apparel. He was discovered by the mate with his plunder and shot. The other Indians fled in alarm, some of the them in their terror leaping into the river. The ship’s boat was sent out to recover the stolen articles, when one of the Indians in the water seized hold of the boat with the intention, as was believed, of overturning it. A stroke from the sword of the cook cut off his hands, and he was drowned. This was the first Indian blood shed during the voyage.

This “Indian blood” serves to consecrate the ground on which “the American Canoe Association has pitched its tents.” An act of violence has rendered this location “historic ground, and a place which for the purposes desired [canoeing] cannot be surpassed anywhere.”

So, what happens to Native American populations when their recreational ability is erased from history, and they themselves are erased from the space where recreation happens? A possible answer could simply be that whites put themselves in the fabricated absence. Where agency is taken away by Native American hands, all that remains are the hands of the whites that stole the agency in the first place.

Still, we cannot forget that our keyword is of two parts, two definitions. The second definition of recreation should offer us hope: “the action or process of creating something again,” “a re-enactment or simulation of something”.

2.

The Chicago Canoe Club was created under the auspices of the Chicago American Indian Center in 1964 (AIC), eighty-four years after the American Canoe Association. Instead of being exclusionary, the Chicago Canoe Club was not only inter-tribal, but also welcomed and worked with white Americans; Ralph Frese a local canoe builder (and co-founder of the club) worked closely with group members to create a fleet of fiberglass birch bark canoes. The birch bark canoe, the same feared as primitive by the white hobbyist of the late 1800s, was the traditional canoe of the Potawatomi Indians in and around the area of present day Chicago. For the Potawatomi it wasn’t a tool for recreation but instead was an integral part of survival. John Low (Pokagon band of Potawatomi Indians) details the cultural importance of the canoe when he writes that “[t]he birch bark surrounded its occupants and carried them safely from village to village and facilitated friendships, social interaction and inter-tribal circulation. In a region of numerous, streams, lakes, and rivers, the canoe served the native vehicle on indigenous highways” (Vessels 7). The importance of birch bark canoes are not only immediately material but are also vital parts of the oral histories of the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi people (6). The canoes even have a profound historical importance: “Some oral histories recount that they were the mode of transport for their great migration west at the behest of prophets five hundred years ago or more from the Atlantic Seaboard to the land where food grows on water (wild rice).”

Dr. John Low (Potawatomi) and William Derrah introduce the group to the Ralph Frese fiberglass reproduction canoe.

A birch bark/fiberglass canoe may give some pause, but in terms of re-creation there is a certain poetry to the material. According to Low,

[Leroy] Wesaw [a founding member, Pokagon Band Potawatomi]  and the Canoe Club favored the craft designed by Ralph Frese to represent the Algonquin canoe because of its style of their vessels; it was a celebration of Indian technology and Indian heritage. Frese’s fiberglass canoes, complete with simulated pitch, the texture of birch bark, and decorative etchings, were purposefully designed to represent the past. However, the material was contemporary and practical. Fiberglass enabled the production of enough canoes for the club members. Wesaw and the rest of the Canoe Club membership made good use of the opportunity afforded by Frese’s canoes. 

Whether or not it was fiberglass made to look like birch bark or actually birch bark that kept canoe club members afloat, the effect was the same–pride, happiness, connection. According to club member Louis (Bird) Traverzo (Lac Courte Oreilles Band, Ojibwe), the Chicago Canoe Club “promoted strong families within the Chicago Indian community by fostering a sense of community and camaraderie. ‘It reinforced a pride in family and being Native’” (Imprints). The Chicago Canoe Club’s main concern wasn’t a technical authenticity, but Indian pride and dignity. Leroy Wesaw, the club’s lifeblood, described the purpose of the club simply “Canoeing serves not only as good exercise and fun for the participants […] Like almost everything an Indian family does, it is aimed at preserving our Indian heritage.” Existing from 1964 to 1972 “the Chicago Canoe Club was not only the most popular sport and recreational activity sponsored by the AIC, but it also became the public face of Indians thriving in Chicago.”

The re-creation of Indigenous water-based recreation does not end here. Vicente Diaz (Filipino-Pohnpeian) is doing important trans-indigenous work in and out of the classroom in Minnesota. Diaz is presently working on a project that “involves a long-term program of cultural revitalization of canoe voyaging and knowledge of land, water, and skyways in the Caroline islands and in Dakota homelands in Rural western Minnesota (Diaz 11). Diaz is connecting indigenous people through water and the use of their specific craft and star maps, while also bringing the canoe and those that would be re-created through it into virtual reality (Tynjala). On the Pacific coast there is the Healing of the Canoe project, a “collaboration among the Suquamish Tribe, the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, and the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute (ADAI)”. The Healing of the Canoe project is “based on the traditional Coastal Salish canoe journey, [which] was identified as the backbone of the intervention” which involves a curriculum centered on Indigenous knowledge and traditions seeking to prevent drug dependency in indigenous youth  (Healing). And, of course, there are still other examples not covered here.

We should stress that indigenous recreation/re-creation takes on many forms. Every pow-wow, every stickball game, in fact every iteration of Native American life in the present day is a re-creation of white settler colonialism set out to and still seeks to destroy. It is in this way that recreation in Native American communities battles some of the same demons that white recreationists fought against at the turn of the 20th century — alienated labor, industrialization, a growing consciousness of self, a desire to mend the spirit that the predominate culture sought to destroy. The differences are many, for our purposes here, where white recreation erases and reframes a white hegemonic mythos, Native American recreation re-creates and re-affirms lifeways, bringing all different types of communities together.

Works Cited

Brightbill, Charles K. & Harold D. Meyer. Recreation: Text and Readings. New York: Prentice

Hall, 1953.

Diaz, Vicente M. “Oceania in the Plains: The Politics and Analytics of Transindigenous

resurgence in Chuukese Voyaging of Dakota Lands, Waters, and Skies in Mini Sota

Makhoche.” Pacific Studies, Vol. 42, No. ½–April / August, 2019.

Healing the Canoe Training Center, https://healingofthecanoe.org/suquamish/, Accessed 20

October 2019.

Low, John N. Imprints: The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians and the City of Chicago.

Kindle Edition, Michigan State U P, 2016.

McAvoy, Leo, Paul Shirilla & Joseph Flood. “American Indian Gathering and Recreation Uses

of National Forests.” Proceedings of the 2004 Northeastern Recreation Research

Symposium, 2004.

“Recreation.” The Living Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, 1974.

“Recreation.” https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/recreation, accessed 17 October 2019.

“Tenting on Historic Ground: American Canoe Association’s Romantic Surroundings at Croton

Point.” New York Times, 15 July 1894.

“The Canoe ‘Boom’.” New York Times, 19 June 1880.

Dunkin, Jessica. Canoe and Canvas: Life at the Encampments of the American Canoe

Association, 1880-1910. U of Toronto P, 2019.

Tynjala, Kate. “Canoes: Indigeneity, Relocation, and Maintaining Tradition,” American Indian

Studies, https://cla.umn.edu/ais/news-events/story/canoes-indigeneity-relocation-and

-maintaining-tradition