Simulating Culture: Being Indian for Tourists in Lac du Flambeau's Wa-Swa-Gon Indian Bowl

Abstract

After the Second World War, increasing numbers of tourists traveled to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to recreate. Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Indians encouraged this process by availing themselves as fishing guides and by building in  the Indian Bowl, within which they staged Indian dances and related cultural performances. This article examines the historical and intercultural sensibility of consuming and producing a simulacrum of Indian culture in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in the s. It seeks to attend to the spectacle's significance and implications for local Indian identity over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.

Historical Ambivalence in a Tribal Museum

“…The news stunned the non-Indian community throughout northern Wisconsin, but especially in the area of the Lac du Flambeau reservation where predictions for the end of the tourist economy and whole way of life filled the cafes, taverns, radio shows, television newscasts and editorial pages. A massive social conflict ensued that involved the entire state and caught the attention of the nation (Nesper 2002).…”

“…It created a Tourism Committee, a Tribal Public Relations Program, and a Speaker's Bureau, passing a resolution stating that tourism and public relations were a top priority, even as the "spearing families" as they were called, extended the range of their off-reservation practice led by a tribal judge, all the while with protests growing. Tourism had been an important source of income for some tribal members for nearly a century at that point (Nesper 2003).…”

Indigenous tourism research, past and present: where to from here?

“…In the United States, the focus of Indigenous tourism research grew considerably over this period with a concentration of papers focusing on Indigenous participation in ecotourism development (Cusack & Dixon, 2006;Garcia-Frapolli, Toledo, & Martinez-Alier, 2008;Hearne & Tuscherer, 2008;Ramos & Prideaux, 2014;Wilken-Robertson, 2006), gaming (Piner & Paradis, 2010), policy, planning and development (Barkin & Bouchez, 2002;Greathouse-Amador, 2005a, 2005bSpencer, 2010;Whitford, 2008;Zorn & Farthing, 2007), land-use management (Kent, 2006;McAvoy, 2002), economic and socio-cultural impacts (Cohen, 2001;Henshall & Momsen, 2002;Ingles, 2001;Ju arez, 2002;Nesper, 2003;Phipps, 2010;Snow & Wheeler, 2000;Wu, Wall, & Tsou, 2014), identity, ethnicity and indigeneity (Picard, Pocock, & Trigger, 2014;Stronza, 2008;van den Berghe & Ochoa, 2000) and authenticity and commodification (Brulotte, 2009;Coronado, 2004). This expanding literature appears to reflect the increase in activity that was being undertaken at the time in relation to the facilitation of socio-economic development for Native Americans (see The Harvard Project, 2008;Henry & Hood, 2012).…”

Responsibility in tourism: A discursive analysis

“…Similarly, Hollinshead (1992) highlighted how tourism parallels colonial discourses when conscious and unconscious practices essentialize and fragment notions of indigenous identity, resulting in ''sedimented historical explanations of indigenous culture'' (p. 43). The pinnacle of such violence may be the quest for ''authentic'' encounters with indigenity through tourism, which Nesper (2003) argued is underpinned by desires to experience a ''Paleolithic'' (i.e., traditional, kinship-based) way of life. Such constructions of ''authentic'' romanticize the past to such an extent that Indigenous cultures, which have certainly evolved, diversified, and adapted over time, have little in common with tourists' expectations (Amoamo, 2011).…”