AA-2026-F77798
On the image
Two girls in their good coats and dress hats are standing in front of a bright blue canvas tipi erected on a suburban lawn, which means someone's father spent part of his weekend driving tent stakes into the grass so his daughters could pose beside a novelty item that repackaged the American West as a backyard toy. The smaller girl wears a flowered straw hat; the older one wears a plaid coat with a corsage, which suggests this was not a casual afternoon but an occasion — a fair, a church event, a school outing — where dressing up and the tipi were both considered equally appropriate entertainment. Spread on a canvas mat in the foreground are craft items: beadwork, a decorated drum, and what appear to be small leather goods, all arranged as an educational display of Indigenous material culture, a genre of exhibit that 1950s America mounted with complete confidence in its own good intentions. The decade had a talent for turning other people's living traditions into wholesome hobby-craft demonstrations, and these two girls, scrubbed and hatted, have been walked through the display and told it is interesting. Nothing about their expressions suggests they disagreed, or agreed, or had any strong feelings about the tipi at all, which is probably the most accurate response available to a seven-year-old in a good coat.
The historian's note
Youth organizations in the United States during the 1950s, including Camp Fire Girls, Girl Scouts, and YMCA day camps, commonly incorporated simplified, non-Native-led programming on "Indian lore" as part of outdoor education and craft badges. Canvas teepee replicas, along with beadwork and drum-making activities, were standard equipment at such camps, purchased from catalogs or built by camp staff rather than sourced from any Indigenous community.
This kind of pageant photograph, staged on a mowed lawn with a homemade teepee as backdrop, is typical of the amateur color photography that documented American family and community life once affordable slide film became widespread in the postwar years. The formal dress of the two children, rather than costume, indicates the event was treated as a notable social occasion, likely a camp demonstration day or an end-of-session parents' visit.
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Two Girls in Sunday Best, Blue Tipi, 1950s. 1950–1959. Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library, AA-2026-F77798. https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-girls-in-sunday-best-blue-tipi-1950s.
@misc{aaAA2026F77798,
title = {Two Girls in Sunday Best, Blue Tipi, 1950s},
year = {1950–1959},
howpublished = {Archive \& Atlas, Historical Image Library},
note = {Accession AA-2026-F77798},
url = {https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-girls-in-sunday-best-blue-tipi-1950s}
}TY - ART TI - Two Girls in Sunday Best, Blue Tipi, 1950s PY - 1950–1959 PB - Archive & Atlas, Historical Image Library AN - AA-2026-F77798 UR - https://thearchive.archiveandatlas.com/library/two-girls-in-sunday-best-blue-tipi-1950s ER -
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