Abstract
Every spring for the last three years the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at Wake Forest University (WFU) has sponsored Boy Scout Day as one of several family oriented Saturday activity sessions. Most of the "Family Days" are exhibit related, providing active extensions to museum designed and community advised thematic presentations. Boy Scout Day is a different phenomenon, designed in part to add "authenticity" to the decades old practice of young boys dressing up as Indians in order to earn proficiency badges. With up to 200 Scouts and their leaders in attendance, the activity has had mixed reception among the principals involved. Boy Scouts love throwing atlatls, learning to flint knap and hearing Native American stories. Anthropology faculty members are skeptical, wondering about the implications of the continued Scout-Indian relationship. Local Native American groups have had an increasing presence, first as vendors, and then as advisors and participants. But has this taken us past a 1950s-era popular notion of what Native Americans are all about, and beyond this, the relationship between anthropology, museums and the indigenous? The following pages explore the ways in which a model of ethnographic collaboration can inform and expand the growing call for public engagement as a motivation for academic/community relationships.
Published Version
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