I had a conversation with the AIs (Claude) this morning about some questions that were bothering me. As I child I played “Cowboys and Indians” without thinking much about it. Why?

To this day I love Star Trek, a 1960s TV show who’s guiding ethos, the “Prime Directive” commands that “strange new civilizations” in the “final frontier” be left to their own devices to develop as they see fit. That sure didn’t happen in the world that had shaped my “Cowboys and Indians” play.

What follows is an AI summary of that conversation. The questions, the direction of the conversation and the details of family history are mine.

The Questions

As a child in the 1960s, I played cowboys and Indians like most American kids. We had multicolored head-dresses from toy stores, toy forts, cap guns. My brother dressed in colonial garb and posed with our great-grandfather’s actual Civil War rifle - a family heirloom. But the more I think about it, the more questions emerge. Why did we play this game at all? And more puzzling: why would any child agree to play the Indians - the losing side?

Family History and the Land

This wasn’t abstract history for my family. We were among the earliest settlers in Ohio. One ancestor was first off the boat at Marietta in 1788, the first settlement in the Northwest Territory. My cousin’s family arrived around 1800 - my grandfather remembered seeing gun slits in their original log cabin. There’s a graveyard nearby, one of the oldest in the area, where my family is buried. My own branch came to the family farm in the 1860s. When plowing with horses near the creek, they found arrowheads and worked stones - there had apparently been an Indian village on that very ground. The land we farmed, the soil our family is buried in, had been someone else’s home.

The 1960s point of view

From the 1960s perspective, this was simply American history. The frontier had closed in 1890. Settlement was completed fact, like the Revolutionary War. The gun slits in that cabin weren’t evidence of invasion - they were evidence of hardship, of survival, of the courage it took to build something in a dangerous place. The Indians in this frame weren’t people with an ongoing story. They were part of the frontier - historical background, obstacles overcome, threats survived. The arrowheads coming up in the plow were artifacts from the “distant past,” even though the displacement had happened within living memory of our earliest ancestors there. The culture reinforced this everywhere - TV westerns, toy stores, movie theaters. Cowboys and Indians was just playing history, like playing soldiers. Nobody questioned it because the story was settled: pioneers came, faced hardships, built civilization. The Indians were the other team in an adventure story, stripped of what conquest actually meant.

Star Trek and the Frontier Myth

Star Trek in the 1960s explicitly invoked this mythology - “Wagon Train to the stars,” exploring “strange new worlds” and “new civilizations.” The “Final Frontier” came barely 100 years after the closing of the American West. The Prime Directive’s “leave those people alone” added ironic twist, given what had been done to indigenous populations in the actual American frontier.

Ancient Ohio

To be fair, Ohio had been occupied for thousands of years. The mound builders left impressive earth-works - Serpent Mound, Fort Ancient, the great works at Newark, Marietta, and Chillicothe. There was even an Indian mound on property next to my great aunt’s house. These ancient civilizations were presented with respect, even wonder - safely distant, like studying Rome or Egypt. They made Ohio’s Indian past impressive, but also… past.

Understanding Without Justifying

This isn’t an attempt to justify any of it. It’s an attempt to understand how it felt at the time, not to impose later analytical frameworks backward. In the 1960s, this was just normal childhood, family history, and the shared American story. The contradictions were there, but they weren’t visible¹ in those terms then.

Footnotes

¹ One example showing that they were visible is the 1964 album Bitter Tears by Johnny Cash who later became one of my favorite artists. When I recently visited the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian this album was included as part of an exhibit showing growing recognition of what had gone wrong.