Well before the term “cultural appropriation” appeared in academic circles — and decades before it entered the mainstream — Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Cree folksinger from Canada, visited San Francisco to perform during the infamous Summer of Love in 1967. At a dinner party one night, she was asked by a journalist from the Berkeley Barb about white hippies’ obsession with and emulation of Native Americans. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, these kids trying to be Indians,” she said. “They’ll never be Indians. The white people never seem to realize that they cannot suck the soul out of a race. The ones with the sweetest intentions are the worst soul suckers.”
Country Fair board member Diane Albino put it this way during a board meeting in 2016: “If there were not cultural appropriation there would never have been hippies. I don’t mean to be flippant, but we turned away from the culture of the time and looked elsewhere.” For early fairgoers, part of the joy in the event was in enacting fantasies of the past. “We were wilder and pushing the boundaries every which way,” one long-time fairgoer said in 2007. “We had to be reminded that we have not seceded from the Union and that we were still bound by the laws of the country.”
Hippies attending the fair in early years cloaked themselves in buckskins and erected teepees, acting out fantasies of Native American life. Kesey and his ilk both exemplified and encouraged an image of the Native American that the historian Sherry L. Smith documents in her book, Hippies, Indians, and the Fight for Red Power. According to Smith, hippies across the country saw Native Americans as “symbols of, and even models for, alternative ways of life…[they] were genuine holdouts against American conformity; the original American ‘long hairs.’”
In addition to going to the woods to play make believe, many hippies ventured to sites of Native resistance. During the rise of the pan-Indian, youth-led Red Power movement in the ‘60s and ‘70s, the interest and involvement of hippies was welcomed and rejected by Native Americans, often at the same time. In Washington state, a number of tribes used a civil disobedience practice they called the “fish-ins” to pressure the government to recognize fishing rights granted in the 1850s.