Dowsing for Divinity

I’ve just seen a photo of a Peter and Jane book published in 1964. (Peter and Jane 1a, Keywords reading scheme, if you want to look it up.)

In the illustration, Peter and Jane are in a homemade “teepee” and Peter is wearing a children’s play version of a Plains Nation eagle feather bonnet.

When that book was published, Indigenous kids were still being sent to residential schools and dying there. The last residential schools closed in the mid/late 1990s.

For those who are not familiar with the Peter and Jane series: it and other Ladybird books are how many British kids learned to read. The cosy 1950s imagery is deeply nostalgic for many people.

Indigenous people didn’t have the right to vote in Canada until 1960: just four years before this book was published. (Source: Canadian Encyclopedia)

It was illegal for Indigenous people to wear regalia, do their traditional crafts, or hold powwows and potlatches. Potlatches were banned from 1885 to 1951. Powwows were banned from 1876 to 1951. Not sure how long traditional crafts were banned for.

According to Facing History: “While government officials and clergy outlawed sacred objects, totem poles, masks, pipes, and the like, many of those same officials and clergy collected them privately, and often sold them at lucrative prices.”

Indigenous people were also unable to bring a court case without permission from the government between 1927 and 1951. (Source: How the Indian Act’s ‘blackout period’ denied Indigenous Peoples their legal rights)

I didn’t share the image with the headdress, because it is probably offensive to Indigenous people. It’s offensive that white kids were playing “cowboys and Indians” while Indigenous kids were being starved and overworked and abused in residential schools. (You can see the image in this article which provides a sociological perspective on Peter and Jane.)

It is not just an innocent image. It’s a reflection of the callous theft of the sacred symbols of a people who were being crushed under the heel of colonialism.

The Indian Act (various versions of which banned powwows, potlatches, and Indigenous crafts) still exists and still circumscribes the lives of Indigenous people in various ways.