This Wooden Indian Forgot His Cigars

When Stephen Harper rose in parliament to deliver a historic formal apology for the residential schools, Phil Fontaine, chief of the Assembly of First Nations, then rose to give a response. The news photos show Fontaine in full, elaborately beaded feather warbonnet.

The National Post has a shot here.

That full feather war bonnet is no more part of Fontaine’s heritage than of Harper’s. Fontaine is Ojibway. The feathered headdress is unique to a few plains Indian peoples. The Ojibway never wore them. Moreover, they are supposed to have a specific meaning: every feather is earned with an act of bravery. For someone to wear such an elaborate one casually is like stuffing one’s chest with fake medals. It is a tasteless blasphemy against real Indian culture.

It is rather as if someone of Irish descent rose in parliament dressed in green top hat and clay pipe, looking like a leprechaun. Except, getting his Northern European ethnicities mixed up, he also wore pointed painted wooded shoes.

Here is how an Ojibway chief like Fontaine ought to have dressed.

All the fake ceremony and culture is done rather cynically, I suspect, for the liberal rubes. Most Indian “leaders” seem completely out of touch with real Indian culture, and seem to get their notions about their own supposed traditions these days mostly from Hollywood, comic books, and old Paul Revere and the Raiders songs.