Crafts, Boys, Ernest Thompson Seton, and the Woodcraft Movement

F. Graeme Chalmers and Andrea A. Dancer The University of British Columbia

This article examines early influences on art education for boys (Chalmers & Correspondence Dancer, 2007) in areas traditionally labeled as crafts. Under review is the work regarding this article of Ernest Thompson Seton, artist, naturalist, storyteller, author, philosopher, may be sent to Graeme crusader for and supporter of indigenous American Indian ways of knowing, and Chalmers, Faculty of a co-founder of the Boy Scouts of America. Within a discussion of indigeneity and Education, University woodcraft, this article contributes to the study of masculinities and art education. of British Columbia, Seton’s Woodcraft Indians and the Boy Scouts of America were early 20th-century Vancouver, BC Canada V6T 1Z4. E-mail: f. responses to what Pinar (2001) has termed the “crisis of white masculinity.” As [email protected] Imms (2003) has stated, “Art education does own a legacy of neglecting boys” (p. 55). Applying Addison (2005), this article considers art and design in the formation of sexual identities. A focus on the life and work of Seton, with an analysis of his semi-autobiographical writing, provides select historical insight into gendered approaches to art education as well as romantic approaches to Native American art and education.

Boys and Crafts How many boys have visited craft supply stores? On her webpage titled “Crafts for Boys,” Keith (2006) noted that boys “do not enjoy arts and crafts as much as girls but certain projects do capture their attention and interest.” Keith further suggested that 21st-century North American boys have been interested in building a magazine rack, a barbeque caddy, a bug house, a CD tower and that paper airplanes, toothpick bridges, computer crafts, aliens, transporters, robots, and spaceships have captured their attention. On a webpage for Sunday school teachers, Keffer (2006) added: “When you say ‘craft time,’ do the boys in your class moan, yawn, escape to the bathroom, or find other creative ways to express their displeasure? Maybe they have a point. Craft books tend to be packed with frilly, sweet-smelling projects. Do boys go for that stuff? Not the ones who live at my house!” Since the introduction of drawing into the public schools, the role of art in boys’ lives has been of concern to educators. On one hand, the first industrial drawing programs prepared working class boys (and some girls) for elementary design work in manufacturing and building trades. On the other, early art education programs acknowledged that exposure to selected ‘fine’ arts could be an uplifting and civilizing force. In early boys’ clubs too, this dual role was apparent. O’Brien (1901) described how the Columbia Park Boys’ Club, in a tough San Francisco neighborhood, used the term ‘strong work’ to describe the experiences provided for boys in clay modeling, woodwork, iron work, and rope-mat making. In addition, the club, like

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the earlier Mechanics’ Institutes [which provided evening educational and recreational programs for young men], subscribed to “some of the best art magazines” (p. 251). Woodcraft and Masculinity What types of art and craft activities have captured boys’ attention in the past? Rogers (1995) claimed that “Boys prefer images that imply action, suspense, danger, or rescue, and/or that include male characters or vehicles” (p. 1). McNiff (1982) added that images drawn by boys often have related to conflict and power, struggle, exotic locations, and sport. Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946), naturalist, artist, and American Indian crusader, noted that activities of particular interest to boys ranged from the making of willow beds, picturesque tepees and decorated tents, war clubs for ceremonial dances, boats, bird houses, bows and arrows, painted paddles, fire sticks and drums to tackle boxes, bird call whistles, picture frames, and photographs of wild birds and animals. For Seton (1921), boys’ crafts were intimately connected to woodcraft, by which he meant “outdoor life in its broadest sense” (p. v)—the love of which had been with him since his own boyhood. A founder of both the Woodcraft Indians and the Boy Scouts of America, Seton stated that, “Woodcraft is the first of all the sciences … it was woodcraft that made man out of brutish material, and woodcraft in its highest form may save him from decay” (p. v). Seton (1917b) presented masculine examples by claiming that: All the great men who have made history were trained first in the school of Woodcraft. Nimrod, the mighty hunter, who built the city of Nineveh; Sardanapalus, the lion-killer, the Monarch of Assyria, who by force of his own arms overcame two lions that attacked him at one time; Brennus, the Gaul, who could shoe his own horse and who was able to master all Rome; Rollo, the sea king, who could 1We acknowledge that steer his own ship in the wildest water and landed in Normandy to the terms Seton used to establish order and lay down laws that are now accepted all over the denote the First Nations world; William the Conqueror of England, the hunter whose bow (specifically Plains) peoples are problematic. was the strongest among all the archers of his day; Charlemagne, When referring to the the great hunter, careful farmer, world master; William of Orange, Woodcraft movement hunter fisherman, sportsman, horseman, arbiter of the destinies of all Seton named the Woodcraft Indian the British Empire; Washington, hunter, woodsman, frontiersman, League, we use Seton’s farmer, and army scout, able to run, wrestle, command or obey; terms of reference Abraham Lincoln, hunter, pioneer, woodsman, axeman, farmer, deck- despite stereotypical overtones. When hand; Robert E. Lee, hunter, woodsman, horseman, planter, farmer; referring to the First U.S. Grant, back-woodsman, frontiersman, farmerboy, soldier, big Nations peoples as the brother to five little ones. (p. 1) Aboriginal peoples of 1 North America, we use But, despite these “great men,” the Native American Plains Indian was at the term First Nations. the heart of the Woodcraft movement. Seton (1921) believed that:

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The Redman can do a greater service now and in the future. He can teach us the ways of outdoor life, the nobility of courage, the joy of beauty, the blessedness of enough, the glory of service, the power of kindness, the super-excellence of peace of mind and the scorn of death. (p. 8) As White (2001) demonstrated, the art and crafts of Native Americans were being brought to the attention of American art educators during this same period through publications such as School Arts. A crafts influence existed in the Boy Scouts of America—an influence initially based on Seton’s Woodcraft Indians. This influence contrasted British Scouting, where a military factor was strong under the leadership of Lord Baden-Powell and where the approach to art equalled drawing similar to that taught to army officer cadets (Chalmers & Dancer, 2007). Seton stated that his aim was to make a man, whereas he felt Baden-Powell’s was to make a soldier (Chalmers & Dancer, 2007). As the Boy Scouts of America history website has noted, boys were taught to “rejoice in the natural beauty of creation” and to “walk in beauty.” The Woodcraft Leagues in North America2 eventually curbed 2 Woodcraft Indian the role of the First Nations peoples as models; it also changed to a co- practice remains active in Central Europe, educational program, thus, influencing the types of arts and crafts that were specifically in the Czech practiced. Like Baden-Powell, Seton believed that to keep a boy interested, Republic, Slovakia, he needed to something to do with his hands, something to think about, Poland, and Russia. and something to enjoy in the woods. Among Seton’s own happiest hours, 3The notion of the “picturesque” reflects the he identified as best time spent in the family workshop and learning to work empire building ethos of with tools to make things both beautiful and useful (Seton, 1941). Seton’s era, where exotic places and peoples, Boys and the Picturesque as well as the animal Seton (1906) believed that it was “picturesqueness”3 (p. 9) that attracted world, were configured as empty landscapes boys. Seton posited that such picturesqueness had been found when dressing upon which civilization and playing Indian, while practicing what he termed “Indiancraft” (p. 9). The could inscribe itself. Woodcraft program integrated Indian names for the months and symbols This was part of the controversy that hovered or pictographs for weather conditions, referred to members as “braves,” around Seton’s writing and required participants to assume Native American names and wear and painting during his “wampum” medals made of beautiful shells. In this way, Seton attempted lifetime, as he resisted these hegemonies and to disrupt the negative stereotyping of First Nations peoples. Based on his actively countered them formative experiences, Seton shifted the emphasis away from aesthetics with the naturalist toward the cultivation of an ecological consciousness (an anomaly for the (ecological) thrust of his animal stories and era) through “doing.” Specifically, Seton appropriated Indian practices that Indian practice (Dancer, nevertheless reified an equally entrenched positive stereotype. For example, in press). each Woodcraft tribe required a standard used by the “Head War Chief” to make proclamations. This was “a staff about eight feet long, painted red and ornamented with any of the designs shown in the illustrations [Illustration 1], the drawing on the shield always being the totem of the Tribe. The small shield on top is white with blue horns” (p. 9).

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Illustration 1. Seton’s (1906) illustrations for a Standard (p. 9).

But of even more importance was the “picturesque” totem pole, for which Seton (1906) gave very specific, rather bossy instructions: In some prominent place in camp is set up the Totem Pole. This bears the national emblems, tribal totems, enemies’ scalps, and the totems of warriors who have brought honors to the Tribe. It also serves as a notice board and carries the Sacred Medicine Scalp. The board below is supposed to be the skin of a White Buffalo. The big shield is white and twenty inches across, the horns pale blue and each twenty inches long. The pole is twelve feet high, and the arms four and one-half feet across; pole and arms are red. This is the same in all tribes. The smaller shield is twelve inches across; it bears the tribal colors and totems, and of course, varies in color with each tribe. The skin is four and one half feet long and eighteen inches at widest place. It is dull yellow … but the circle at its upper end is white, in the middle of this is a peg on which hangs the Medicine Scalp; the wooden feathers are white with black tips. If made smaller it should keep these same proportions. (pp. 15-16) Boys were encouraged not only to create totems based upon First Nations traditional arts in the woods, but also to observe the “signs and blazes” that were increasingly commodifying urban space, noting that “some trade marks and all armorial bearings are of the nature of totems” (p. 130). Seton further explained that the “value of city Woodcraft is not merely in the things themselves but in being able to see the things about you. Begin today,” he implored, “to see, comprehend, and master the ordinary daily things of your life” (p. 130). Artistic ability had its place in the tribe. The “Chief of the Painted Robe, or Feather Tally” was required to have enough artistic talent to record the

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Illustration 2. Totem Pole (Seton, 1906, p. 15).

various honors and exploits of the tribe, and illustrate these with sketches and photographs in a book “bound in a leather cover which may be decorated in various ways” (Seton, 1917a, p. 164). Each brave required a headband to hold the feathers that he won and to which his horse-hair “scalp” was fastened. Seton was scrupulous in attempting to provide accurate representations of First Nations traditional arts and practices; however, they were based on the portrayal of the imaginary Indian of ethnologists, anthropologists, and the popular ideas of his day as to what was authentic. Still, he stayed true to his own boyhood experiences of nature. These were the underpinning of his work as a naturalist, writer, and wildlife illustrator—as well as founder of the Woodcraft Indian League. Boys, Sketching, and Nature Photography In his autobiographical adventure story of two boys who lived as Indians, Seton (1903) praised Audubon’s now famous drawings and had his “little savages” in Woodcraft make bird drawings. He suggested that the boys sketched, not because they loved drawing, but because they loved the things that they were drawing. Seton underwent a similar shift in his career as an artist—away from romantic portrayals of the natural world towards increasingly realistic subject matter that privileged the brutality of nature’s laws over man’s sense of the proper order. Seton (1906) viewed photography, then reaching the middle classes, as a viable ally in teaching woodcraft. Photography was a “masculine” pursuit and a medium of “authenticity” (p. 65). Boys who wanted to win feathers for their war-bonnet photographed wildlife: a wild bird larger than a robin, sitting on its nest; a ruffed grouse drumming; a wild animal or fish in the air; or a large wild animal in its native surroundings but not looking at you (p. 65). In this era before sophis- ticated lenses, each animal had to be at least one inch long on the original photographic plate. These requirements demanded that boys develop their powers of observation and their abilities to move unobtrusively through the landscape to capture a realistic impression of nature. The emphasis was on a boy’s experience of the animal world rather than an end product that was

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aesthetically pleasing to “civilized” sensibilities. Seton embraced this lesson over a lifetime of struggle and controversy in a masculinizing world that was headed in the other direction. Ernest Thompson Seton 4At various times in Ernest Thompson Seton4 was born in South Shields, near Newcastle, his life, owing to both his own self-indulgent England on August 14, 1860. His selfish and dominant ship-owning father snobbery and his wish was acknowledged as “a clever pencil artist” who loved books and art and to identify with First demanded respect (Seton, 1941, p. 5). Seton5 noted an uneasy relationship Nations peoples, Seton between father and son. Seton was closer to his mother, who claimed that was also known as Ernest Evan Thompson, she named the 12th of her 14 children “Ernest” because at the time of her Ernest Evan Thompson- pregnancy she was reading the work of Ernest Maltravers. Maltravers was Seton, Ernest Seton- a country gentleman, who was also a hunter, a sportsman, and a natu- Thompson, Wolf Thompson, Wolf Seton, ralist—traits that, in addition to art, were to characterize Seton’s life. About and Black Wolf. 1865, the ship-owning business failed and the family contemplated a move 5Most of Seton’s to Canada. In his autobiography Seton wrote: “Pictures of log houses with biographical infor- painted spruce trees all around, and bears and wolves in the background, mation in this article is drawn from his 1941 gave me thrills of mixed interest and fear” (p. 10). Not long after arriving autobiography. in Lindsay, Ontario, Seton stated that he was able to engage in a number of “wildwood thrills” (p. 15). Making things became an important part of life in Ontario. Seton called the family workshop “our college of handicraft” and reminisced affection- ately about making model ships, bats, balls, whistles, picture frames, and “woodcarvings of birds and beasts” (p.25). At the age of 11, he remembered making woodcuts, carving peach stones into baskets, and making smoke prints of leaves. At first disappointed to move to Toronto in 1865, it was not long before Seton recorded the “thrill” of still being able to find wildlife (p. 99). In particular, he enjoyed visits to Toronto Island and the Don Marsh. Seton also wrote about being “thrilled” by the “cigar-store Indian on the corner of Albert and Yonge Streets” (p. 99) and claimed to have written “an Indian play, in which the Indian, though a villain, came out triumphant” (p. 100). As a 14-year-old, he built an “Indian cabin” on undeveloped land. Seton recalled: I gathered shells, feathers, curios in the woods and arranged them on little shelves. I imagined myself Robinson Crusoe and Swiss Family Robinson rolled into one. I hoped some day to re-establish Indian life in some form. I played Indian, Ran about without anything on but my boots, so as to get sunburned brown. An old putty knife … for a hunting or scalping knife…. I made myself a pair of moccasins of some old sheep leather. They did not last more than two or three days, but they were magic moccasins to me. I stuck feathers in my hair, and cultivated an Indian accent. I adopted an Indian vocabulary. “White man heap no good” was a favourite phrase. (Seton, 1941, pp. 105-106)

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He was devastated when “white men” tramps moved in and wrecked his sacred space. Summers continued to be spent in rural Ontario, where the slowly developing young man enjoyed leading the other boys “in the ways of Indian life” (p. 111). It was there that Seton built his first tepee, made bows and arrows, and “did all [he] could to re-establish Indian ways” (p. 111). Seton claimed that it was his overbearing father who determined that he should be an artist, when his own first choice was to be a naturalist. His second wife, Julia Moss Buttree, herself an artist, characterized him as a strange combination of exact scientist and imaginative romancer (Keller, 1984). As a youngster, Seton had a few lessons in oil painting from Toronto neighbor Mrs. John B. McGurn. His first painting was of a dead hawk. Seton claimed to have been the top art student at Jarvis Street Collegiate High School in Toronto. Seton (1941) stated that at the age of 16, he “made sketches of business houses and sold one or two to be used in advertising. I colored photographs and took them to firms that dealt in such things … I made sketches of animals and birds” (p. 127). He was photographed in front of an easel. For two years Seton was apprenticed to a Toronto portrait painter, John Colin Forbes. Seton was responsible for laying out the master’s palette and for tracing images from photographic negatives on to canvas. Seton found these years monotonous and was critical of Forbes’ formulaic approach. He joined the night classes at the Ontario School of Art. Among his well- known teachers were Marmaduke Matthews, Lucius O’Brien, John Arthur Fraser, and T. Mower Martin. Charlotte Schreiber took a particular interest in young Ernest and his work and invited him to draw and sketch at her country property. Schreiber was an expert animal painter who nurtured her protégé as an artist/naturalist. In 1879, Seton won a gold medal from the Ontario Society of Artists and left for England. At first, Seton considered studying at the South Kensington School of Art with which the Ontario School of Art was loosely affiliated (Chalmers, 2005), but he eventually decided on the non-fee paying Royal Academy Schools where admission was based on a well-rendered drawing of an antique figure. Seton set about drawing theHermes in the British Museum. This was 6 rejected, but in 1880 his drawing of Michelangelo’s Satyr was accepted. At 6See http://www. heart, Seton was a naturalist and particularly valued one advantage of being crystalinks.com/ a student at the Royal Academy: free admission to the London Zoo where he hermes_statue.jpg and http://www.physiologus. went to draw animals. He also had a Reader’s Ticket to the Natural History de/satyr.gif. Retrieved Library at the British Museum. In June 1881 he exhibited two black-and- November 3, 2007. white drawings, Coots and Bullfinch, at the Dudley Gallery. He also made 7Many of Seton’s drawings for the publishers Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.7 drawings and paintings 1⁄ can be viewed at www. After 2 2 years, Seton returned to Toronto where he designed Christmas aloveoflearning.org/ cards and trademarks, the income from which made it possible for him to setonart.php. Retrieved join a brother who farmed in Manitoba. Seton (1941) wrote of the “thrill” of November 3, 2007. lighting his first campfire in the West:

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“I shall never see London again,” I said, “and I don’t care.” Fast to my girdle was a beaded Indian medicine bag in which I carried my valuables. I got them out—some money, a letter from my mother, … [other letters] my seven year’s free pass to the Royal Academy … and my life ticket to the British Museum. (p. 234) After consigning most of these items to a fire, he wrote, “That was the end of my London life. That was the end of my life ticket to the Museum Library. That was the beginning of life to me” (p. 234). This ritual purge cleared the way for Seton’s subsequent focus upon and respect for Native Americans. Recording an encounter with aboriginals in Manitoba, Seton wrote: White men desiring something that they could see in an unprotected camp would have helped themselves and thought little of it. But these were Indians—wild pagan Indians, absolutely honest; and they scorned to take anything that belonged to people with whom they were at peace. (p. 239) Seton’s stay in the West convinced him that he could combine art with his love of nature and Indian lore, and so, in November 1883, he moved to New York where he found a position as an illustrator and sold animal stories to magazines. He also attended night classes at the Art Students’ League where he met fellow student Daniel Carter Beard. Beard was founder of the Sons of Daniel Boone, a boys’ organization that, like the Woodcraft Indians that Seton would eventually establish, was later merged into the Boy Scouts of America. At the Art Students’ League, Seton’s life drawing instructor was William Sartain, a close friend of Thomas Eakins. While in New York, Seton made drawings for C. Hart Merriam and the Reports of the Biological Survey (See Henderson and Preble, 1935). Having established himself sufficiently as a wildlife illustrator, Seton was able to return to Manitoba in 1884 to work on The Birds of Manitoba (1891). Back in New York in 1885, he shared an apartment with Henry M. Steele who became art director for Scribner’s Magazine. Here, Seton received an order for 1,000 wildlife drawings at $5 each for The Century Dictionary (Century Company, 1889-1891). Launched at last, Seton was so busy that he declined C. Hart Merriam’s offer of a position as staff artist at the Smithsonian. In 1886 Seton returned to Canada to work on various stories and illustrations and, in 1890, went back to Europe. But this was a different sort of visit. He sought out wildlife and nature painters such as John Swan, Archibald Thorburn, and the prestigious German animal painter, Joseph Wolf. Seton was also a great admirer of Edwin Landseer’s work. He went to Paris where he studied painting under the French masters Jean-Léon Gérôme, William Adolph Bougereau, Emmanuel Fremier, and Henry Mosler. He worked at the Académie Julian in the mornings and at the zoo in the afternoon. His painting of Sleeping Wolf was exhibited at the 1891 Paris Salon.

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Seton returned to Canada in 1892 where his large controversial picture The Wolves’ Triumph (later re-titled Awaited in Vain), rejected by the Paris Salon, was shown in Toronto and later at the Chicago World’s Fair (Seton, 1941). The painting was based upon a story in a French newspaper about a man in the Pyrenees who was eaten to death by wolves. Seton’s stark realism portrayed a natural order that challenged man’s dominion—in effect, he had turned the tables by reducing man to a half gnawed skull and aggrandizing the wolf as a powerful creature in its own terms. Popular human sensibilities deemed this portrayal offensive; however, it was in accord with Seton’s ideas about the “noble redman” who understood humankind in accord with nature’s laws. The Wolves’ Triumph provided the occasion for him to meet Mohawk poet Pauline Johnson. According to Seton (1941), Johnson seized both of his hands in hers and said, “I know we are kin. I am a Mohawk of the Wolf Clan, and that picture shows that you must be a wolf spirit come back in human form. We are fated to work together” (p.290). Later, Johnson sent Seton a treasured silver talisman in the shape of a wolf. The Woodcraft Indians For much of the remainder of the century Seton concentrated on writing and illustrating books on wildlife (Seton, 1891, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1899a, b). He married for the first time in 1896, and after a period of travel, developed his country estate near Greenwich, Connecticut. Local lads jumped the fence that Seton built to protect the wildlife, and so they were invited to join in activities that Seton planned. Known first as “Seton’s Boys” this was the beginning of the “Woodcraft Indians” eventually absorbed into the Boy Scouts of Americas. Reliving his own childhood “thrills,” Seton began a regular column to disseminate his ideas about woodcraft in the Ladies Home Journal. At first these ideas were included in Two Little Savages (Seton, 1903) as a fictional account that was later reshaped asThe Birchbark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians Containing Their Constitution, Laws, Games and Deeds (Seton, 1906) which was revised and reprinted annually for a number of years. One chapter, “Some Indian Ways,” dating from the first columns in the Ladies Home Journal, was well illustrated and constantly reprinted. Seton gave instructions for building and decorating tepees, Indian seats, a headband, a war bonnet, a war shirt, leggings, moccasins, war clubs, paddles, a drum, peace-pipe, an Indian willow bed, Indian body paints, bows and arrows, and horsehair scalp together with totem poles, detailed elsewhere in the book—all the picturesque paraphernalia that are still made and used in some children’s summer camps in North America. Rather than as plagiarism or appropriation, such “crafts” and activities have needed to be understood within Seton’s great respect for Native Americans. The various editions of the Book of Woodcraft, published between 1902 and 1922, reinforced that Seton saw the Indian as the great prophet

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of outdoor life, who could teach the “nobility of courage, the joy of beauty, the blessedness of enough, the glory of service, the power of kindness, the super-excellence of peace of mind and the scorn of death (Seton, 1921, p.8). Although not opposed to “playing” Indian through fake powwows and ceremonies, Seton’s respect for Native American visual art certainly went beyond the more usual North American summer camp experience of “sewing beads on belts.” Seton (1939) envisioned Indiancraft as a practice wherein decoration constituted an art form that exceeded Western traditions (p. 229- 231). The decorative arts tradition he promoted was closer to the form of Indiancraft practiced in Germany and the Czech Republic, where men in particular have excelled at sewing elaborately beaded, quilled, and feathered costumes as well as crafting totem poles and tepees. A hundred years ago, Seton (1906) had this to say about Native American art: All students of the Indian art are satisfied that in this we find the beginnings of something that may develop into a great and original school of decoration. Not having learned their traditions, conven- tions, and inner impulse, we believe that at present we shall do best by preserving and closely copying the best of the truly native productions. Therefore, in decorating tepees, etc., we use only literal copies of the good Indian work. (p. 29) The founder of British scouting, Lord Robert Baden-Powell read the first edition of Seton’s The Birch Bark Roll of the Woodcraft Indians (1906). A number of Seton’s ideas were used or adapted in Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908). Although acknowledged in a minor note, some commen- tators, including Seton himself, accused Baden-Powell of direct plagiarism. However, Baden-Powell’s movement spread and the Boy Scouts of America was formed from existing related organizations, including Beard’s Sons of Daniel Boone and Seton’s Woodcraft Indians (Seton, 1910). Seton became Chief Scout of the Boy Scouts of America from 1910 until 1915, after which he re-established the Woodcraft Indians. Freed from the Boy Scouts of America’s more overtly masculine, patriotic, and military leanings, Seton’s Woodcraft Manual for Boys (1917b) introduced three demanding art-related “degrees” or badges. The “Art Craftsman” award was conferred on boys who successfully completed 15 of the following tasks: 1. Make a ceremonial suit for one’s self. 2. Make a ceremonial belt of beadwork telling a story. 3. Make a ceremonial suit for a younger Woodcraft boy or girl. 4. Dress a doll (not less than 10 inches high) accurately in Woodcraft ceremonial suit, or some other distinct outfit. 5. Make a gardening or artist’s smock with smocking. 6. Embroider a ceremonial dress, symbolic or Indian design.

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7. Make a head band or shoulder strap or equivalent in quill work. 8. Make 5 yards of handmade lace. 9. Make and decorate a pair of Indian leggings or moccasins. 10. Make a leather cushion cover with beadwork, or appliqué one of linen or a woven cover. 11. Weave a rug, Indian design preferred. 12. Make a box for feathers of leather or of birch bark. 13. Make an attractive box or bag for rubbing-sticks and tinder. 14. Decorate a blanket similar to a Sagamore’s. [A “Sagamore” was a lesser chief or a great man among the tribe to whom the true chief would look for wisdom and advice.] 15. Make 3 useful articles with burnt work decorations. 16. Carve 3 useful articles such as spoons, forks, bowls, fire socket, and ornament with Indian designs. 17. Make a frame for a picture out of a single piece of wood 8 inches by 10 inches. 18. Make a tray in basketry complete with glass mounting. 19. Make 3 pieces of silver work of good design. 20. Make 3 pieces of brass work of good design. 21. Make and decorate a brass or copper bowl, vase, or plaque. 22. Make 2 hanging baskets of willow or raffia suitable for porch decoration, fitted with holder of glass or tin. 23. Make a frame complete with glass and back, for Woodcraft charter. 24. Tell the meaning and name of 10 beadwork designs used by American Indians such as rain, star, etc. (p. 375) The “Art Metal Worker” required boys to complete 15 tasks from a similar list of 19 metal projects. The “Backwoods Handicraftsman” was the most “manly” of these qualifications, requiring boys to undertake tasks such as: make a hunter’s lamp, build a cabin, build a boat, or build a stone or brick bake oven. Boys, and later girls, returned to Indian crafts. Some of the Woodcraft and American Indian influences have continued within the Boy Scouts of America, particularly in a branch known as “traditional scouting” summer camps. Other organizations have also been traced to Seton’s influence. Seton wanted his followers to rejoice in the things of the imagination. For example, the YMCA Camp Belknap (2006) in New Hampshire advertised that boys would make crafts from natural materials, experience drawing and painting, and “Woodcraft in the tradition of naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton.” In response to environmental movements, sustainability, “Green” ideology, neo- liberalism, and the dehumanizing influences of technology and urban life, there has been a revival of Woodcraft in Britain. The Oxford Woodcraft Folk

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(2006) announced: “Making stuff is one of the most satisfying things we do.” In North America, not much has changed: the Boy Scouts has continued to be the primary woodcraft organization for boys. Surprisingly, in the Czech Republic, Seton’s legacy has endured since the Czech poet Milos Seifert translated the Woodcraft Manual in the early 1900s. The first tepee was erected in 1913, and woodcraft was formally established in the 1920s. In recognition, Seton and his second wife visited the Czech Republic in 1936 (Ernest Thompson Seton Institute, a). However, rather than operating as boys camps, Czech Woodcraft and Indiancraft Leagues have been comprised of tribes, clans, or bands, and families who practice together and pass the craft between generations—specifically between boys and men who become highly skilled at making costumes and artifacts according to traditional Plains First Nations designs. Seton’s manual has continued to be a resource for woodcraft, Indianism, and children’s organizations throughout Central Europe. Although Seton’s legacy has remained important, it would be a mistake to totally credit him with being the first to recognize the value of woodcraft for boys. Maynard (1999) identified the earliest North American summer camps for boys as pre-dating the Woodcraft Indians, the Boy Scouts, and the Sons of Daniel Boone by at least 20 years. He suggested that these early summer camps influenced Seton more than Seton influenced their later development. Higham (1970) described the “outdoor movement” of the 1880s as the time when nature equalled “virility … that masculine hardiness and power that suddenly seemed an absolute remedy for the artificiality and effeteness of late 19th century life” (Maynard, 1999, pp. 16-17). Maynard suggested that a key societal goal, reinforced by movements like the Woodcraft Indians, was the creation of an “ideal boy”—an intermediate between the “tough” and the “sissy” (p. 17). Gendered Woodcraft In the Woodcraft Manual for Girls (Seton, 1916b), published a year after the boy’s manual, no distinction existed between the tasks that enabled boys and girls to attain various woodcraft degrees—in this, the gendered versions of the manuals are identical. However, an analysis of their respective introductory texts, when considered in triangulation with Seton’s (1903) fictionalized autobiography, Two Little Savages, revealed layers of constructed gender as an embodied practice under erasure (Dancer, unpublished manuscript). In Seton’s Two Little Savages (1903), the character Yan (a fictionalized version of Seton as a boy), was directly called out of his “taxidermic“ civilized body into alignment with nature in the form of a type of woodpecker called a Flicker: The unknown wonderful voice in the spring morning, sending out its “cluck, cluck, cluck, clucker” in the distant woods, the large gray Woodpecker that bored in some high stub and flew in a blaze of gold,

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and the wonderful spotted bird with red head and yellow wings and tail in the taxidermist’s window, were all resolved into one and the same—the Flicker or Golden-winged Woodpecker. The child’s process of coming to knowledge (through observing and naming) has been mediated by the movement through space and degree of detailed description of the body of the bird in contradistinction with its reproduction as a deadened and stuffed urbane version. For Seton, civilization was a form of disconnect (a degree of death) with an originary natural self. This passage focused on the dormant potential in the boy to become attuned with a sanctifying nature that is one and the same with a civilized adult self mediated by the experience of phenomenon as sensate (seen and heard). This passage mapped the worlds Seton sought to resolve during his lifetime as (a) a scientist and artist; (b) the progenitor of the Canadian animal story genre (in which he narrated the animals voices based on his naturalist practice); and (c) as a man who actively sought to shift the Progressive era’s delimiting between the human and animal world (Wadland, 1978) in order to justify human need for resources. As a version of Seton, the boy-child Yan actively engaged in experiencing nature as passage towards becoming an ecological citizen of the planet at a time when environmentalism and ethology were not recognized sciences. In Seton’s “A Message from the Woodcraft Chief to the Boys of America” (1916a), the ideal boy was instructed along the spectrum towards adulthood in the coda of the naturalist’s gaze. The narrator Seton, as “the Woodcraft Chief,” was now at the height of his career and popularized as a writer and naturalist. In this version of the event of observing the Flicker, the boy was an initiate in the process of being instructed, rather than brought directly to the experience—a degree of collapse in embodied experience that is evident in the text: A large bird flew overhead, swinging through the air in a succession of festoons. He [the boy] said eagerly, “What is that?” “A flicker,” I [Seton] replied. “See the sheen of his yellow wings like sun rays as he flies? See the white star on his back? And on his breast, if you could see, you would find a dark moon, so he is in all ways marked for the heavenly bodies. (pp. xi-xiii) Comparatively, movement in the process or degree of embodiment within one’s environment was evident in the text’s movement away from the child mediating his own experience towards the narrator, from Seton the child (Yan) to Seton the adult (I). The text shifted towards traditional allegoric and rhetorical tropes. This child was in the process of being socialized; phenomena have been named and made spiritual in man’s terms. The boy’s body has been harnessed, and as with the reductive description of the bird as embodied phenomenon, the boy-child as a part of nature comes under erasure as it moves away from an intrinsic purity.

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These movements of embodiment in the texts have pointed to the biological determinism of Seton’s times that are still operating socially today: Boys belong to the physical world and girls to the ephemeral. For the boy-children in these texts, the natural world was within reach through a masculinised and pragmatic will to knowledge—a propensity toward under- standing (a boy’s natural curiosity) through observing in the tradition of the physical sciences to which Seton was drawn. The Woodcraft boy was brought to adulthood through embodiment mediated by a teacher into an activity of categorizing and naming in order to transcend worldliness, nature and the human world being counter domains. In comparison, the specifically gendered introduction in Seton’s “A Message from the Woodcraft Chief to the Girls of America” (1917a), the female body was abstracted in its intrinsic alignment with nature. This removed embodied practice from view and situated agency with the masculine authorial voice. In an article that positioned the women/nature debate within the framework of ecological socialist feminism, King (1987) noted that: The debate partakes of the ontology versus epistemology debate in western philosophy, where “being” is opposed to “knowing” and implicitly women are relegated to the realm of “being,” the onto- logical slums. From an ecological (i.e. anti dualistic) standpoint, essentialism and ontology are not the same as biological determinism. In other words, we are neither talking heads nor unselfconsciousness nature. (p. 128) The multiplicity afforded by an anti-Darwinian social ecological standpoint has diversified the knowing/being binary; and while the potential for this diversification was in place in the non-genderizing of the tasks set out in the woodcraft manual, this does not occur in Seton’s gendered introductory texts. Rather, the epistemological tetherings of biological determinism were firmly in place and operated as Seton situated the boys and girls along these “natural” boundaries. This also delimited the boys’ bodies in relationship to society in value bound ways reflective of the state of the natural sciences. Moving through the texts, the social construction of nature changed with the social positions that indicated how power is lodged and how the text reconfigures as well as conflates. Girls and their bodies remained under the greatest degree of erasure. The happening of the Flicker, in relationship to the female body, was reduced to “the power to see a bird when you hear its note” (Seton, 1917a, pp. ix-xi). The passage from which this is excerpted was an allegory where the male narrator is under the gaze of a feminized and spiritualized nature goddess that Seton names “Faunima.” Etymologically, this word was made up by Seton and consisted of the Latinate “fauna,” the animal made super-animate in its ending “ima.” The girl was not placed in the text as embodied but as a third person “you,” and the female in the text was mythologized and made spirit—the female body was absent from the phenomenon in its physical capacity.

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Despite differing agendas (experiential, socialized, ephemorized), spaces of resistance have emerged consistently as movement through space in the male gendered texts. Walking marked one such space, the flight of the bird another. However, spaces of resistance have not been apprehended in the third text, as girls are not the object of commodification in this particularly masculinized world of bodily practice that is in need of realignment with nature because of its reproductive and labour based political agendas. Resistance has stayed with the original experiencer at the moment of experience, the moment Seton felt had shaped his adulthood and one that he advocated through Woodcraft Indianism. Conclusion: The Children in the Wood Seton’s Woodcraft Indian legacy has revealed much about socially constructed masculinity as well as the notion of art versus craft. Why has the movement been relegated to the periphery in North America, whereas it has thrived in parts of Europe? In part, it has been a matter of the timing. The Boy Scouts of America overshadowed the Woodcraft League with a similar product—one that was more palatable to a resource (natural) hungry power base; one that distanced the First Nations peoples rather than held them as an ecological ideal. But it has been more than this. One must consider what has been revealed about the culture of boys doing art in North America; about the cultivation of formulaic relationships between self and other; about the location of everyday practices, products, and creativity; and about gendered aesthetic, experiential, and constructed concepts of nature. These consider- ations have impacted the meaning boys (as men in the making) make of their everyday lives in an increasingly alienated locale termed modernity. It also has determined what power relationships boys are reproducing in the way that they are perceived to engage with the material world as masculinized and ecological. Perhaps the boys who absent themselves from arts and crafts time at school have a point: There seems to be so much more weighing in the balance than sewing beads on a belt. In Seton’s words: “Woodcraft is lifecraft for ages four to ninety-four” (Ernest Thompson Seton Institute, b). If this idea is accurate, we may find those absented children out in the woods today, and everyday, crafting an animated space for themselves that both is and exceeds what is imagined for them.

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