I am currently dressing 2 inch cowboys and native Americans.
If this statement strikes you as top heavy with political correctness, I’d agree because what I’m really doing is reproducing boys toys of the 1950s, which were more to do with the films of the time, which were wonderfully one sided, than any actual history.
History, as we know, is written by the winners. For quite a while the winners will strut their stuff and be obnoxious while the truth goes under, often never to surface again. In the history of North America, however, unusually, the truth has resurfaced laudably and universally, which makes Internet searches for ‘costume, Red Indian’ really tricky. What I’m after is the cinematic version, what I got was an amazing selection of photographs. If you add the cowboys in by inputting names of known cowboys who existed and then scrutinise the photos it’s quite an amazement that the natives didn’t win. They’re smarter, cleaner, taller, stronger and considerably better dressed. The Europeans are a scruffy lot, mostly they look like they’re waiting around for a drainage system and mains electricity.
My husband’s family were pioneers who went across America with an ox train. They most certainly didn’t set off as big, strong, clean, rich winners. They were runty outcasts, desperately trying their luck in a new country because it had run out in the old one. Most of the settlers who became the cowboys must have been like that; in general, in need of a good wash and a square meal.
The photographs do not lie, they are well worth a look. The diversity of the natives living in a vast land and adapted to every climate is spectacular.
But that still didn’t help with dressing dolls that represent toys. So I stopped being politically correct and put Cowboys and Indians into my search engine. Guess what I got?
The Village People!
I’m just going to have to sit right down with my husband and watch a cowboy film. I’ve never done it deliberately but I might just have to force myself. The lengths I go to to dress dolls are quite ridiculous.
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