Camp Sitka’s ‘little civil war’: nostalgia, surprise, and white ignorance at a Boy Scouts of America camp

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the summer of 2018, we explore the role of camp programming and staff discourse in the (re)production of white ignorance at Camp Sitka, a wilderness Boy Scouts of America camp. Using epistemologies of ignorance, we examine two important pieces of nostalgic camp programming and the justifications and surprise to them among two seemingly antithetical groups of camp staff members, traditional ‘old Sitka’ conservatives and progressive ‘new Sitka’ staff. We argue that both pieces of camp programming mobilised nostalgic longing for an imagined version of the American past, made possible through the active forgetting of histories of white violence. Both nostalgia and surprise arose from and reproduced white ignorance. More specifically, both ‘nostalgia’ and ‘surprise’ were narrative distancing moves that obscured racist realities, which fuelled a cycle of ignorance that ultimately helped insulate systems of racial inequity from meaningful critique.