The Appeal of Summer Camp in a Colonized North America
With over fourteen million campers attending camp every camping season, the industry breeds an influential culture and inevitably affects a large cultural network of people. It's influence is important to acknowledge considering the millions of children's upbringings and opinions it is responsible for - every summer. There is an increase in exposure that outlines ideas some children have never seen, heard, or experienced at home and this worldly view is so essential to the socialization that takes place in camper cabins.
Summer camps were first established across North America in the mid 1880s in response to growing concerns about emasculation in urban settings. These small, privatized camps were catered solely to the sons of elite families primarily in the New England area. However, a large spell of building sprees enticed a larger group, now fit to include middle-class boys, served mostly by religious organizations such as the YMCA, or the Young Men’s Christian Association. In 1901, the YMCA estimated it served approximately five thousand campers every summer and fifteen years later, that number had grown to over twenty-three thousand.
Summer camps more problematically serve as a central site of Indigenous appropriation. Since the very birth of sleep-away summer camps, a number of names, practices, and motifs have employed and stolen Indigenous tradition. Campers might be separated into ‘tribes’, cabins are named after real, or realistic, Indigenous group names, host powwows, create legends that connect them to a distant past, and call camp directors ‘Chiefs’. These Indigenous traditions becomes somewhat of a “caricature”, says Dr. Paul Hutchinson, who teaches at Boston University and co-curated a museum exhibit on the history summer camps in New Hampshire.
In February 2022, Camp Kummoniwannago, renamed Camp K, had been utilizing an intricately offensive name since the camp’s creation in 1995. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, the group who own and operate the camp, say the camp’s name “was just a play on the words – ‘come on I want to go’”. Co-founder Bangishimo Johnston of the Land Back Camp, however, says the name is a mockery of broken Indigenous language and the Indigenous struggle to adapt to a colonized English-speaking space.
Not only are summer camps sites of appropriation, it matters as they are also powerful social points. Across the United States, roughly fifteen thousand camps serve twenty-six thousand campers every summer. “Outside of public school, more American kids experience summer camp than any other institution,” notes Dr Hutchinson. Camps operate both during the day and in sleep-away formats, some with specialities narrowed in on music, religion, science, or theatre, allowing parents to work throughout the summer with guaranteed childcare, although this ability to occupy their children does not run cheap.
Camp is an expensive space to exist in and there is a distinct lack of support and encouragement for parents with lesser incomes to send their children to camp. This phenomenon ensures that summer camps host campers of similar backgrounds and restrict the ability for broader opportunity. Financial differences are slim, stigmas are rampant, and a hierarchy is implemented in cabin dynamics as a result. This attitude tracks into adulthood and actively stalls mindset shifts. Campers are acutely aware of their families’ financial leverage, and this promotes discussions and comparisons about clothing brands, second homes, material possessions, their parents’ occupations, and private schooling. These home-adopted behaviours are reinforced in such a secluded setting and built upon when surrounded by others in mirrored positions.
The camp industry is a growing economic giant, reigning in 3.91 billion dollars in the United States alone in 2019. While this number inevitably dwindled because of the pandemic it’s resurgence as an industry has not faltered, but rather grown in interest. Every year, millions of North American parents send their children to spend time in the woods so as to develop skills in a contained environment. The benefits of attending sleepaway summer camp as a camper are undeniable; socialization during the largest lapse in the school year, an extended break from the screens that burn holes in our minds, and a newfound sense of belonging within a community supported by cheers and cabin bonding.
The appeal to parents for in-person activity in an era of quarantine and isolation isn’t hard to grasp. I myself attended camp for nearly a decade pre-COVID and worked as a counsellor in the heightened super-spreading peak of 2021. Within younger cohorts especially, anxiety and lack of socialization skills ran rampant. Similar to the experiences of those campers infected by the era of SARS and MERS, mild to moderate symptoms of depression were exhibited, caused by feelings of “frustration, irritability, hopelessness, little interest or pleasure in activities, [and] reduction in outdoor activities”. The evolved behaviour of campers has stunted in the context of being away from parents, likely for the first time, since being around them all day every day in an isolated environment throughout the pandemic.
With the ever-presence of COVID-19, demand within the camping industry has escalated immensely. Demand is driven by a need for outdoor exposure within the context of excessive use of social media, online gaming, and screen time in newfound academic trajectories. To accommodate this demand, however, camps are increasingly charging parents more and struggling to keep up with hiring appeal amongst young people.
Having spent multiple summers as a staff member at a sleep-away camp of the same nature to which I’m writing this article, I feel confident in saying that this job is most definitely twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week commitment-wise. There is no such thing as being off the clock when it pertains to the wellbeing of other people’s children. The position of a camp counsellor is so unique and absolutely underrated in the context of responsibility and corresponding pay-grade. With minimal support from the summer camp industry and the spread-thin management on site, deeply-embedded social issues, and less-than-ideal paying incentive it can be difficult to understand how and why there are staff members who return year after year to a job that exhausts them so. This is so plainly rooted in a genuine love, appreciation, and devotion for a space that has, oftentimes, harboured their childhoods and served as a pivoting aspect of their time growing up.
While the camping industry obviously serves intricate problematics, it is equally important to understand the loving foundation it sits on. Without the network of people who admire the space, these camps could not operate every summer. It is an engrossing industry that preps its employees from childhood with incited yearning for the mystery and secretiveness that acts as the veil of camp counsellors. It’s like an exclusive club that you are bred to be a part of.
Change is a healthy thing that hasn’t necessarily made its active rounds in the camping community. These institutions still foster discrimination, segregation, and appropriation – evidently not in the same way they fostered these ideals in the mid 1880s, but enough for it to still need shifting.
Header by Nanika Sandhu
