In addition to being a Cub/Boy Scout, I was also an Indian Guide as a wee li'l sprout. I've since learned that "Indian Guides", the program, has been renamed "Y-Guides", for reasons that I hope would be obvious; however, it looks like the practice of taking "Indian names" is still around. I don't want to come off sounding like I'm somehow against the Guides program—the bonding experiences I had with my dad as a Guide are a highlight of a somewhat troubled childhood—or the practice of taking on a cool-sounding new name, which every kid (and pretty much every adult: take a look at any internet forum/message board/etc) knows is completely awesome.
No, I only bring this up because, for some reason, I remembered that my own "Indian name"—now, bear in mind that this was chosen by a six-year-old boy for himself—was "Lightning Eagle", and my very next thought upon remembering this was "oh no, I bet the Google image search for 'lightning eagle' is just the worst", and please see the image above for confirmation of that hunch.
Having grown up in a household that would probably happily have referred to itself as "jingoistic" if only it hadn't been aware of the negative connotations of that word, I'm not terribly surprised that this sort of imagery had been percolating in my bone marrow before I was even able to flatter myself with the idea that I was capable of thinking critically. My dad ordered, from one of his many weird, paramilitary-styled catalogs, one of those old POW/MIA bracelets and wore it non-stop for a while; I remember thinking it was weird to see my dad wearing what my young brain categorized as "jewelry", which was, of course, for me at the time an explicitly feminine-coded category. We bought into—literally and figuratively—the churned-up POW/MIA right-wing marketing hoax as whole-heartedly as anyone did or could have.
I was, of course, as likely to have spelled my newly-adopted name "LIGHTENING EAGLE" as anything else, so there's that. And "Wee Li'l Sprout" would actually make an excellent nom du forêt for a scrawny, scrappy kid that didn't go around thinking he had some sort of tough-guy image to maintain.
