Random set of the day: Indian Kayak
Posted by Huwbot,
Today's random set is 2846 Indian Kayak, released during 1997. It's one of 11 Western sets produced that year. It contains 18 pieces and 1 minifig, and its retail price was US$0/£0.
It's owned by 985 Brickset members. If you want to add it to your collection you should find it for sale at BrickLink, where new ones sell for around $40.40, or eBay.
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26 comments on this article
At first glance it looks more like a snowmobile than a kayak.
Kayak...no..."Dugout Canoe"...maybe, but our builder here would have gone too far to the sides (a dugout canoe is made by taking a tree of wide enough trunk, and digging out basically more of a cockpit; then shaping the bow and stern...kinda like 'log flume' rides):)
Charming use of parts to form a simple kayak. Would've really liked this as a kid. The Indian minifigures on the other hand are incredibly detailed, I parted this dude together awhile back and starting building a little village.
When the river's frozen it's a bobsled, too (I'm ignoring the background of desert clime).
I hadn't realied that 215 got a (downsized) remake.
Its retail price was $0!!
canoes or "kayaks" back then weren't red so this is a modern version [maybe a reenactment but they forgot the right colour?]
Nifty. I think it’s a clever use of a small amount of parts for the kayak. The minifig is terrific.
What a great little set! The Indian minifigure is very detailed and interesting, while as others have said the kayak is built out of the simplest pieces but works quite well.
Interestingly, this minifig has an outline for its nose - which is quite rare for minifigs (happened, but rare - we now even have Pinocchio)
Do I spy a spear, an axe, a bow and a paddle? This guy is ready for anything.
Is it…upside-down? It looks like it would work better as the bottom than the top. Also, kayaks are typical of the boreal tribes of North America. Based on this guy’s outfit, he should probably be using either a dugout or a birchbark canoe.
@MeisterDad:
I was just in Utah last week. At Bryce Canyon National Park, they said one of the driving forces of hoodoo formation is the fact that the region undergoes around 200 freeze/thaw cycles annually. While it’s technically not a desert, most of Antarctica is.
Can't say anything about the kayak but the figure is vey special, at least to me.
One year we had "make your own Christmas crackers", and a lot of people round
We put a piece of this in each of the crackers (and a picture of the set in the final one) as a fun group game of building the set.
Think we had to combine a few pieces in to the same cracker (hair and feather were together)
Is Brickset quoting "five finger discount" prices now?
[Yes, I know it was a promo set]
If you raise the right arm, flip the left hand around, that oar could be held at an optimal angle for rowing. These things are made of a more rubbery plastic and are subject to easy scratching with just regular use, but there's definitely going to be little claw marks from an improper attachment like that.
I like how for how small it is it still feels quite complete. There's even a bit of branches, possibly to hide the kayak after landing it somewhere on a riverbank. And the minifigures from this era are more premium than some of what we get now... printed legs!
When I lived in the US, I had a friend who was half First Nation American. She would describe herself as 'half Native American'. I never heard her call herself 'Indian'. By 1997 when this set came out, hadn't the term 'Indian' to describe an autochthonous American fallen out of favour? (This is a genuine question; I'm not seeking to make a rhetorical point.)
Another set that I have... pieces of from last October's lot. I have both curved slopes (I'm always surprised when they turn up in standard sets: I had a bunch of them as a kid from my first Freestyle bucket 4146 and then didn't encounter them in any other set for the entire rest of my childhood so assumed that they were unique to Freestyle), a few but not quite all of the other plates the kayak is made of, the leaf, and the guy's torso.
...that's it, that's the extent of how much of the set I own.
As such I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Being such a tiny set, even with those few pieces it's too close to completion for me to want to just part it out and forget about it; but Western minifigure parts aren't particularly cheap on Bricklink to try and complete it - and it especially doesn't feel worth that cost if I'd just sell the rebuilt set again afterward, as is my plan with several of the rest of the ones from the lot. So it's just sort of 'there' at present.
@Zander said:
"When I lived in the US, I had a friend who was half First Nation American. She would describe herself as 'half Native American'. I never heard her call herself 'Indian'. By 1997 when this set came out, hadn't the term 'Indian' to describe an autochthonous American fallen out of favour? (This is a genuine question; I'm not seeking to make a rhetorical point.)"
It really hadn't, despite the work the various Native American nations had tried. That's definitely how they referred to themselves, but aside from politicians making public speeches, the term "Indian" was the common name. I'd honestly say it wasn't until 2010-2015 that "Native American" was widely used in textbooks and common conversation.
I actually came to the comments to see if all the Jack Stone haters chimed in that they didn't like this little set as being "too basic." =-) Maybe they all took a day off?
The build is a bit awkward, but it works kind of well togethere with the various rivers included in the larger 1997 Western sets. It was also nice to add up a few more minifigures to those.
Suspiciously, none of the 1997 Western figures got any official names in the NA market. Or am I missing out on something?
In the EU, there were a few:
Chieftain: Big Chief Rattle Snake (UK)/Häuptling Schwarzer Adler (Chief Black Eagle, Germany)
Female: Sui (Germany)
Red Shirt Tribesman: Running Bear (UK)
Tan Shirt Tribesman: 'The chieftain's son' (DK) (well not that much a name, but a bit lore at least)
@Zander said:
"When I lived in the US, I had a friend who was half First Nation American. She would describe herself as 'half Native American'. I never heard her call herself 'Indian'. By 1997 when this set came out, hadn't the term 'Indian' to describe an autochthonous American fallen out of favour? (This is a genuine question; I'm not seeking to make a rhetorical point.)"
It’s…complicated. Depending on exactly who you ask, they’re Native Americans, Indians, Amerinds, Amerindians, First Nations (this seems to mostly pertain to Canada, as far as I’m aware), probably at least a few more terms I’m either unaware of or have just forgotten, or they may prefer to just be referred to by their individual tribal nation. Except that gets complicated, because “Navajo” isn’t the Navajo word for Navajo. It’s the name white settlers used for the Diné people (see also: Japan vs Nippon), but at this point it’s kinda hard to get everyone to collectively stop using the term we all learned for the largest body of native people in the US. And there are probably other tribes whose ancestral name is not the one that’s commonly used.
But wait! There’s more! Everyone south of the US/Mexican border would count as “Native Americans”, but nobody ever refers to them as such. They’re Hispanic, or Latin American, or Latino, or (and you can’t even pronounce this in Spanish, because it’s another term that was invented by white people) Latinx. In the boreal region, we’ve been told to call everyone Inuit, but it turns out that was the result of the Inuit outvoting all the other tribal groups when they decided to nail down a preferred term for all the boreal tribes (in Alaska, where there aren’t many Inuit, they still prefer to be called Eskimos, according to one who did a presentation I watched at the Alaska Native Heritage Center, and the US gov’t just punts and calls them “Alaska Natives”).
Basically, if you asked 100 of these people to give you a list of preferred, acceptable, unacceptable, and offensive terms for collectively referring to the native peoples of the Americas, you’d probably get at least 100 differing lists, because a lot of it comes down to personal preference. Some differences of opinion may also be generational.
Now, there certainly are a few terms that are simply not okay under any circumstance, including a five-letter word that starts with “I”, and is often preceded by “Honest”. But there doesn’t seem to be enough consensus on which single term to use to eliminate usage of all the rest.
@graymattr, @PurpleDave, Thanks :~)
@graymattr:
Oh, um, Jack Stone both sucks and blows. His mother was a hamster, and his father smelt of elderberries. A real hoser, eh?
@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"Another set that I have... pieces of from last October's lot. I have both curved slopes (I'm always surprised when they turn up in standard sets: I had a bunch of them as a kid from my first Freestyle bucket 4146 and then didn't encounter them in any other set for the entire rest of my childhood so assumed that they were unique to Freestyle), a few but not quite all of the other plates the kayak is made of, the leaf, and the guy's torso.
...that's it, that's the extent of how much of the set I own.
As such I'm not quite sure what to do with it. Being such a tiny set, even with those few pieces it's too close to completion for me to want to just part it out and forget about it; but Western minifigure parts aren't particularly cheap on Bricklink to try and complete it - and it especially doesn't feel worth that cost if I'd just sell the rebuilt set again afterward, as is my plan with several of the rest of the ones from the lot. So it's just sort of 'there' at present."
It looks like most of the value in one of these sets, unboxed but complete, is actually in the minifigure so you would be spending put for not much return. File this one in the "ain't worth it" category (and for the record I battle with this conundrum all the time - incomplete low value sets found in bulk lots which I'm really tempted to fully reassemble and re-home, for reasons I can't quite articulate).
I did not remember that I had this one!! I have to look for it in my parents' house!!
@ICAbricks said:
"Those Indian minifigures from the Western theme were low-key kinda racist, what with the bulging noses and wrinkles. That, and they mixed elements of multiple different tribes into one, which is stereotypical amd definitely not acceptable today. If LEGO redoes the Western line, hopefully they'll paint Native Americans in a more respectful light.
Heck, maybe they could even team up with the sheriff to raid a bandit hideout or trade with cowboys at a frontier fort."
Yeah, there’s a reason that the Western line in general hasn’t come back, modern Westerns like Cohen Brothers films and Red Dead Redemption treat the era and the bigotries of it with a certain nuance and condemnation that would be nigh impossible to express in a LEGO theme. Design-wise, these were probably the most racist LEGO Native American Minifigures (the “Red Indians” weren’t Minifigs) but there’s also an unmistakable tastelessness to a Minifigure based on a white guy playing a Native American (Tonto from The Lone Ranger theme), especially given how inaccurate the design is to literally any tribe.