Girls at the Totem Pole, Frontier-Themed Park Display, 1950s

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Girls at the Totem Pole, Frontier-Themed Park Display, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Girls at the Totem Pole, Frontier-Themed Park Display, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-C0C0A7

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A girl in a plaid wool coat stands beside a painted totem pole topped with real animal horns, one hand resting on it with the casual authority of someone who has just explained to a smaller child what a totem pole is. Behind her, a field of brightly painted canvas teepees in red, yellow, and blue stretches across a park lawn, the kind of outdoor attraction that mid-century America assembled from equal parts civic enthusiasm and confident misunderstanding of Native cultures. A smaller girl in a gray coat and yellow hat waits nearby, apparently assigned the role of audience. The whole installation has the cheerful, approximate quality of an era that considered 'Indian village' a perfectly good theme for a children's day out, and no one in the planning committee doubted it for a moment. The totem pole itself is painted in bold, graphic colors that owe as much to a hobbyist's imagination as to any Pacific Northwest tradition, and the girl touching it has no idea she is resting her hand on a document of its time.

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