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Simulating Culture: Being Indian for the Tourists in Lac du Flambeau's Wa-Swa-Gon Indian Bowl
- Ethnohistory
- Duke University Press
- Volume 50, Number 3, Summer 2003
- pp. 447-472
- Article
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After the Second World War, increasing numbers of tourists traveled to the Northwoods of Wisconsin to recreate. Lac du Flambeau Chippewa Indians encouraged this process by availing themselves as fishing guides and by building in 1951 the Indian Bowl, within which they staged Indian dances and related cultural performances. This article examines the historical and intercultural sensibility of consuming and producing a simulacrum of Indian culture in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in the 1950s. It seeks to attend to the spectacle's significance and implications for local Indian identity over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.