“Eloquence belongs to the conqueror”; my first memory of the American Indian Other.

When I was little, like all young children I would forever be lost in my own fantasy world. It’s as if my imagination went into overdrive in an attempt to grow up and be the dominant, adult party. I wanted the trappings of adult life; after all, adults were in charge. So a box became a car, paper became money, and a long card tube became a gun. Later these were replaced by purpose built toys, such as my prized third generation action man, his plastic hands long since eroded and replaced with dollops of my mother’s clay. I once got into trouble with my father for dressing him in black and crafting a small swastika armband for him. I placed him at the end of our concrete garden path and threw stones at him, making ricochet noises for a miss and a scream for a hit. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t seen doing this, instead I was caught by my grandmother, who had lived through the Second World War, as I walked back into the house still carrying my plastic “Nazi effigy”, and my game was taken out of context. She took me to my father and I explained myself; he was less concerned than my grandmother, evidently having not been involved in “The War” provided him with a less emotional stand-point. After my explanation was relayed back to my Nan, everything was fine.

So many of my games centred on warfare and combat, I suppose this is fairly typical of boys; an ancient genetic hardwire teaching us how to hunt and defend ourselves.

There was no shortage of toys when I was a child, my grandmother worked in a toy shop when I was very young and would often bring home gifts to win my favour or indulge her own sense of wellbeing. Once she bought a Cowboys and Indians play set; a sheriff’s badge, pistol and hat for the budding colonist roughrider, and a bow and arrow and cheap plastic headdress for the young native, all wrapped in tight film against a card backer; the image on the board showed two smiling cartoon children, wearing the attire and pointing their imitation weapons at each-other.

That cannot have been my first experience since I had already decided which I would be; the victorious cowboy, revolver in hand and sheriffs badge pinned upon thick denim; civilisation against the wilderness and its wild inhabitants. This caused a conflict with my brothers who also identified more with the hero lawmaker than the warrior Indian. Our dispute settled we ran around the garden slapping our mouths and making the well-established, universally-stereotyped Indian war call. When one or the other was “shot” we would perform a dramatic dying scene; waving a hand in front of the wound to simulate the blood jetting from the vein. This was perfectly acceptable.

Before I can even remember, I must have been exposed to some external media that inspired my determination to be a Cowboy rather than an Indian; perhaps it was “Dr. Quine: Medicine Woman”, that my grandmother would insist on watching every Saturday night, or the rare “Western” that my father would watch on a Sunday afternoon.

Then there was the media designed for my age group, such as the “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” book I loved so dearly. It contained a two-page-spread of a traffic jam, with a variety of cultural stereotypes interspersed throughout; there was an Arabic character, identified with a mud-brown skin tone and a turban sat upon a magic carpet, a French character in a stripy shirt, string of garlic around his neck, driving a croissant-shaped truck, and an American Indian, with a red painted face, his exposed chest partially covered by his long headdress, arms crossed and oversized lips pulled down at the corners in a permanent grimace. He sat in his archetypical pose on the back of a horse; I didn’t want a horse, I wanted a car like my dad, or a fast red one like the one moving at the front of the queue in my big hardback book. I, like every other child, wanted to be the coolest hero, and they all drove sports cars and carry guns.