Four Beads: My Brief Tenure In Indian Guides
I did not do Boy Scouts. I had no interest. All the kids at my school who did Boy Scouts were bad at recess football and when you are in second grade this is how decisions are made.
Kids who were good at recess football did Indian Guides. I don’t want to overstate my ability at recess football, but I’ll say this: I did Indian Guides.
Kids do Indian Guides with their Dad. I had a Dad. Indian Guides had a lot of weekend outdoor activities that required camping. I had the wrong Dad.
My Dad did one event. We had to set up a tent on the beach. He had no business being this bad at setting up a tent. I went through my entire life avoiding camping because of how hard he made setting up the tent look. A tent is a couple rods and a tarp and it broke him.
With another father’s help he got the tent set up and then it was like, waiting for darkness? Camping never made sense to me. It eventually got dark. We sat around a fire and sang with other sons and dads. We also did a bunch of weird — by weird, I mean extremely made up and inappropriate — Native American rituals. It would be like if aliens wiped the human race off the map and then every weekend went to the wreckage of a once standing strip mall and pretended to be us.
My Dad and I watched these CFOs and divorce lawyers pretend to hold a Chiricahua tribal council. The bonding my Dad and I had was in quietly acknowledging to one another that this was very stupid. Eventually we got spared from nonsense and we got to go back to our tent for the night.
We did not stay in the tent for long. My Dad set up camp on the side of a sand hill so we were sleeping on a slope. We also didn’t establish a Don’t Kick Sand in The Tent policy so the floor felt like the inside of a bathing suit. Small militias of sand got everywhere. Every two seconds I was getting out of the tent to walk to the water and flush the sand out of my eyes. I would come back and kick more sand in the tent. We did this for a couple hours until I heard my Dad say, “I’ve had enough of this shit.” He and I got out of the tent. He ripped apart the tent enough to pack it into his car and we bolted back to our real home.
Each Indian Guides family got a “spirit animal”. Each member of the family would then throw a fun little thing in front of it. Like, if your family was the Bear family you could be Strong Bear or Happy Bear or something else that is probably offensive.
But I wanted that poorly made up, offensive Native American name. I wanted to be able to boil my family down to one animal. But the James family wasn’t in Indian Guides long enough to get an animal. Camping on the beach was too much for the patriarch of the James family to endure. Hanging his head in shame, he brought me to what amounted to the Indian Guides orphanage and left me at the front steps. In reality he brought me nowhere. He sent an email.
I was Indian Guides Adopted by the Wilkinson Family. They were Owls. My friend JoJo was Spotted Owl. His Dad was Strong Owl. I was Keith Owl because I did not speak up about my desires.
The next event was a camping trip in Borrego Desert. Strong Owl got the tent set up real nice. We did some hiking. I ate a Lunchable. I was really getting a taste of the southwestern Native American culture.
When it got dark all the Dads did their fake tribal stuff, we sang songs, but we did this one activity that I have brought up to like, three separate therapists. It was this bead trading activity where each kid gets five beads and then you get to trade your beads with other people. All kids got FIVE beads. My socialist, liberal montessori school raised brain was like, we are all going to walk out of this shit with FIVE beads. The beads will change, to be expected with trading, but we will all walk out of here with FIVE beads.
NO. As soon as the event started, some parents started giving their kids MORE BEADS. So I am trading with kids who have whole Ziploc bags of beads. And some of these kids had shiny beads. We all wanted shiny beads. The kids who stuck to their government-funded beads did not have any shiny beads. The kids with shiny beads either wanted more shiny beads or wanted you to give them multiple beads for shiny beads. So we are moving past one-for-one bead trades. I had to make a tough call.
I decided to get emotionally attached to my original five beads. I was UNDERSTANDABLY INFURIATED that these asshole fathers fucked up this fake Native American tradition, but I made peace with the situation.
Sort of. When the activity ended I had four beads. Somebody stole one of my beads. My adopted Dad, Strong Owl, did not understand why this was a big issue. He was like, “Just get a bead from JoJo (Spotted Owl). He has a whole bag of beads.”
SPOTTED OWL HAS A BAG OF BEADS AND KEITH OWL HAS FIVE BEADS? DO WE NOT FEED OUR SONS EVENLY FROM THE SAME BEAD BOSOM?
Spotted Owl did not give me any of his beads because they were, and I quote “His beads.” I left Borrego Desert with four beads. All of my therapists agree that this is sad.
I am classified as an adult now. I STILL think that no one should have given their kid more beads than anyone else. I STILL believe that every kid should have walked away with five beads. But I know as an adult that the world is not built to accommodate these measures.
In some sense, I’m still trading beads. I have seen enough to know that I had a bag of beads bigger than most. I’ve also had a lot of beads smacked out of my hands during a few horrible life events. Some beads are mine and I can’t really trade them and they give me more advantages than others. Guess what color those beads are.
I am going to have a kid soon. My kid is going to run into bead situations her entire life. And I honestly don’t know what to teach. Do I give her a big bag of beads? Do I teach her to steal beads? Do I stand next to her and make sure every deal she is making is fair?
Beads, man.
