I was 6 years old when my mother dressed me in a Native American costume. It was made from a paper grocery store bag, and I was thrilled. I had a pretty imaginative childhood.
Fast forward more than two decades later, where I discovered a black and white picture of my great uncle in Indian garb. In recent months it has occurred to me that this is something people are doing, not just an oddity from my youth. So of course I asked around, and it turns out that many of my friends had engaged in this behavior in some form or another.
Indians have captured the imagination of a lot of people for various reasons, but something magical must be happening here.
In Germany, a Karl May Festival is a cultural phenomenon that draws large crowds of Germans in Indian costumes. Even the people of the Czech Republic engage in the ritual of dressing like Indians. In Europe, the infatuation with Indians wove itself into the fabric of several movements.
Fast forward more than two decades later, where I discovered a black and white picture of my great uncle in Indian garb. In recent months it has occurred to me that this is something people are doing, not just an oddity from my youth. So of course I asked around, and it turns out that many of my friends had engaged in this behavior in some form or another.
Indians have captured the imagination of a lot of people for various reasons, but something magical must be happening here.
In Germany, a Karl May Festival is a cultural phenomenon that draws large crowds of Germans in Indian costumes. Even the people of the Czech Republic engage in the ritual of dressing like Indians. In Europe, the infatuation with Indians wove itself into the fabric of several movements.
Czech people portraying Indians in a kohte, 30th anniversary of the Triptis Indianistik meeting, 1988.
Germans, ~1970.
I suppose the act of dressing up like an Indian has meant different things to different people over the centuries, but there are some commonalities throughout. If your culture has anxiety about its place in geopolitics, and a yearning for a return to grassroots and nature, the Indian might be appealing. Karl May's fiction popularized the idea of plains Indians for German readers. So the people of Germany post WWI, impoverished and demoralized on so many levels, had a world of fantasy to escape into. It wasn't just fantasy though. Parallels were drawn between the Indians and the tribal pagans of Germany's antiquity. The Indian became a symbol for criticizing the cold and alien world of modernity and its politics. The persona of the Indian allowed Germans to explore pagan roots in a time when modernity filled the German man with doubts about his identity.
Indians inspired a great many people to see the world (and humanity) in a different way: family first, tribal, primitive, and nature based. There's little trace of these values in the modern world.
The Indians I encounter in real life prefer online communities. They wear clothes manufactured from synthetic fibers in dubious circumstances overseas. They fire their shotguns at the mountainside and leave their shells in the sand when they're done. They're postmodern people, like the rest of us.
The ritual of dressing like an Indian isn't just about the Native American people. It's something that transcends all that. It's a symbolic thing, an organic thing like art or spirituality. It's a connection to youth and innocence, I think. Because we're not connecting to Indians this way; they find the practice distasteful, sometimes even offensive for us to engage in. It's the societal naivete of the noble savage. It has less to do with Indians, and more to do with how the west saw them during a particular time in history: with sympathy, and with a longing for our own innocence.
And that is where I'll stop. You can read how this is relevant to my work when Salamander and the Unscarred Mind is published. Cross your fingers for me.
Indians inspired a great many people to see the world (and humanity) in a different way: family first, tribal, primitive, and nature based. There's little trace of these values in the modern world.
The Indians I encounter in real life prefer online communities. They wear clothes manufactured from synthetic fibers in dubious circumstances overseas. They fire their shotguns at the mountainside and leave their shells in the sand when they're done. They're postmodern people, like the rest of us.
The ritual of dressing like an Indian isn't just about the Native American people. It's something that transcends all that. It's a symbolic thing, an organic thing like art or spirituality. It's a connection to youth and innocence, I think. Because we're not connecting to Indians this way; they find the practice distasteful, sometimes even offensive for us to engage in. It's the societal naivete of the noble savage. It has less to do with Indians, and more to do with how the west saw them during a particular time in history: with sympathy, and with a longing for our own innocence.
And that is where I'll stop. You can read how this is relevant to my work when Salamander and the Unscarred Mind is published. Cross your fingers for me.
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