On Playing Cowboys and Indians

In this article, I return to the imaginary world of my childhood to uncover what lessons I learned playing cowboys and Indians. I isolate performative moments that prove both productive and unproductive for an ethical sense of the Other. Interspersed between these reflections is the critical commentary of Michael Yellow Bird (2004), a scholar working on behalf of Indigenous People, that calls into suspicion any nostalgic longing I might still carry from my days of childhood innocence. I begin by entering my childhood sensibility, my desire to have more and more cowboys and Indians.

I don’t know when my collection started. It seems as if I always had toy cowboys and Indians, always considered them my favorite toy, always wanted more. The other boys could have their trucks and cars, their balls and bats, and their rock collections; I wanted those little plastic cowboys and Indians, those figures I could hold in my own hand, spread out on the floor, and examine. I remember rushing to the toy aisle while my mother would shop. I would search until I’d find the cowboys and Indians hanging from a hook in clear bag. I’d slide the bag off its hook and then turn and turn it so that I could see each figure. I would sit on the floor and study them, intently, noting each pose, each weapon, each accessory. I’d enter another world. Time would slip away. My desire to claim them as mine would grow. When my mother would come to gather me, I’d beg her to buy them for me. Sometimes she would.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

I came face-to-face with several near-identical plastic bags full of little red toy Indians and blue cowboys. I was momentarily stunned as I gazed at this nauseating display of Americana. (p. 35)

Over the years, I accumulated more and more cowboys and Indians. Some came to me not just from the display aisles of grocery and five-and-dime stores but also from Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogues. I’d move through the pages of toys until I’d spot them—sets of cowboys and Indians; some had a wagon or a teepee, some had a fort for the cowboys to protect and the Indians to attack, and some had figures with poses I had never seen before. I’d move from pictured image to pictured image, wanting to know what was there, wanting to be a wise consumer. I would fold the catalogue page down and tell both my mother and grandmother that I found what I wanted for my birthday.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

Imagine if children could also buy bags of little toy African-American slaves and their white slave masters; or Jewish holocaust prisoners and their SS Nazi guards; or undocumented Mexicans and their INS border control guards. (p. 35)

I would need a full afternoon to get everything in place. I would start by dumping out my large box of Lincoln Logs. Some of them came to me from by my older brother, and some I accumulated with passing birthdays and Christmases. I had enough to make a small town. I’d start with the hotel and saloon, a two-storey structure with windows on both the bottom and top floors. Next I’d build the livery stable, a coral to the side for the horses, and the front left open as a working space for the blacksmith. Once completed, I still had enough pieces for four or five more buildings, depending on size. As I worked on, I let my imagination guide my way—perhaps I’d make the general store, a home with a slanted roof, a doctor’s office with steps leading up the side. No two could look alike, but all required a hitching post. As the buildings took form, I would anticipate how I would position the cowboys and Indians, how I would place them just before the battle was to begin.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

Cowboys and Indians have, for me, come to symbolize American past and present infatuation with colonization and genocide. (p. 34)

Once the town was built, I would put away any remaining Lincoln Log pieces and then dump out the cowboys and Indians from another large box. The first task was one of separation—the cowboys and Indians each had their pile. In the cowboy pile would go the covered wagon and the men who would sit behind the harnessed horses. Certain cowboys belonged on certain horses. The soldiers who came with my Fort Apache set needed to be together with their own horses. Spare horses went in the livery stable. I would put the cowboys in place first, some ready to shoot from windows, some on horses ready to confront the Indians, and some ready to fire from behind the hitching posts or the sides of buildings. The cowboys I liked least I’d put in the most vulnerable spots—they would die early in the upcoming battle.

In the Indian pile were Indians of various shapes and feel. The ones with the most spectacular plastic poses were as thin as a quarter. The most fragile ones were made of hard plastic. If I tried to put them on the thick cowboy horses, their legs would snap and would require glue surgery. They had to be mounted on their thin spotted horses. The ones I most cherished were formed with a softer and thicker plastic—they would never break. I’d allow plastic textures to determine tribe. Each tribe would be set separately, ready to attack the town from a different angle.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

I wondered how many young Chinese women have died or been poisoned by breathing in the toxic chemical in molten plastic while they poured the red liquid to make the Indians and the blue to make the cowboys, all this so American kids can practice killing Indians. (p. 36)

Placing the Indians, I’d deploy various strategies. The Indian chief, known by his full headdress of feathers, would always lead his warriors on horseback in a direct assault. Others would sneak into the coral attached to the livery stable, ready to free the horses once the battle began. Still others would find their way on to the roofs, ready to pounce on the cowboys who were looking in another direction. A few would be left by their teepee, ready to protect their home.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

As a child I observed that whenever the TV Indians battled with the TV cowboys, not only did we spectacularly lose, but to add insult to injury, we were also presented as screaming, grunting, unreasonable savages who unjustly assaulted and/or killed what seemed like the most helpless, likeable, and innocent white people in the world. (p. 40)

As I would build each structure and place each cowboy and Indian, I would let my imagination run free. I would envisage what it might be like to live in such a town, what might happen in each dwelling, what house might provide the best protection. I would consider what each cowboy and Indian might be thinking as the battle was about to begin, what cowboy or Indian I would like to be, and what each cowboy’s and Indian’s location might foretell about his chances of survival. I would position myself, my head resting on the floor, so I could see what they saw. I’d turn this way and that so I could get a better view. I took it all in, wondering. Then the battle would begin.

The Indians would come swooping in, whooping as they shot their arrows and threw their spears. The cowboys would return fire, their bullets always ricocheting, even when they struck their target. Some died from a tomahawk that mysteriously just came through the air. Some died from shots that had no hand pulling the trigger. Some knew the agent of their demise. Many one-on-one confrontations occurred, each taking shape by the weapons that were held. Each cowboy and Indian had his moment, a moment where I determined his fate. The battle would always come down to the last two figures, who would fight to the tragic end. Sometimes a cowboy would win; sometimes an Indian would win.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

I began to pray silently that we (his friend’s children and himself) wouldn’t play with these guys because I knew I would want the Indians to kill all the cowboys, and it wouldn’t be pretty. (p. 38)

Playing cowboys and Indians was my first ethnographic adventure. Growing up in New Orleans, the world of the cowboys and Indians was different from mine. They lived in a distant place, a place that I, like the ethnographer, found intriguing and wanted to enter. I would puzzle over how they lived, what tools they had for warfare, and why they used their weapons against each other. Before entering the field (of play), I had some texts in the form of films that helped shape my impressions, but I left those texts believing that both cowboys and Indians were capable of great injustices, that neither held moral superiority over the other. They were fighters; the cowboys’ were advantaged by their more powerful technology, rifles, and the Indians by their tactical skills and their fierce and relentless commitment to the fight. These were men of action, men who were teaching a young boy what it means to be a man. They were also men who garnered my attachment, who I came to love, and who I knew suffered the pains of battle. I felt the spear in the stomach, the rifle butt to the side of the head, the fall from a horse. I sensed why a cowboy or an Indian would help another of his kind. I admired them, wanted to be one of them, and I didn’t care on whose side.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

A reason these figures are tolerated is due to the subconscious demands of white American supremacy over Indigenous Peoples. (p. 36)

In my childhood days of ethnographic study, I fell into the many problematic stances Conquergood (1985) identifies in his moral map. I engaged in the “custodian’s rip-off,” using the cowboys and Indians for my own selfish interests; I moved with the “enthusiast’s infatuation,” not knowing just how superficial my understanding was; I took on the “curator’s exhibitionism,” displaying the cowboys and Indians with all the sensationalism I could bring forward. But I never acted with the sensibility of the “skeptic’s cop-out.” Even as a child, I wanted a “dialogic engagement,” a “genuine conversation.”

I do not blame myself for those early encounters with cowboys and Indians. I played with the innocence of a child who might ask another, “Why is your skin a different color than mine?” I noted differences, but they did not seem to matter. I did not wonder why no women or children were ever present, why men were the designated fighters, and why being a man meant doing such things. I did not wonder about how one group of people might oppress another group. I did not see one group or the other as victims.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

It . . . took some years for me to understand that colonialism is a sickness, an addiction to greed, supremacy, power, and exploitation and that cowboys and Indians are one of the colonizer’s drugs of choice. Cowboys and Indians are this nation’s most passionate, embedded form of hate talk. (p. 42)

Privilege comes in many forms. One of my many privileges was to play with cowboys and Indians.

Michael Yellow Bird writes:

Whites must refuse to be little blue plastic toy cowboys blindly accepting their position of privilege in society and, instead, truthfully amend this nation’s history and practices of colonialism while seeking justice on behalf of those they have colonized here and abroad. Until this is done, cowboys and Indians will continue to be toys of genocide, icons of colonialism. (p. 46)