Crafting 'The Indian': Knowledge, Desire, and Play in Indianist Reenactment

By Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

In Europe, Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, has developed out of a strong fascination with Native American life in the 18th and 19th centuries. “Indian hobbyists” dress in homemade replicas of clothing, craft museum-quality replicas of artifacts, meet in fields dotted with tepees and reenact aspects of North American Indian lifeworlds, using ethnographies, travel diaries, and museum collections as resources. Grounded in fieldwork set among networks of Indian hobbyists in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and the Czech Republic, this ethnography analyzes this contemporary practice of serious leisure with respect to the general human desire for play, metaphor, and allusion. It provides insights into the increasing popularity of reenactment practices as they relate to a deeper understanding of human perception, imagination, and creativity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Apr 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780857453457

Petra Tjitske Kalshoven

Petra Tjitske Kalshovenis a Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has taught in McGill University’s interdisciplinary Arts Legacy program and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Aberdeen from 2007–2009.

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Introduction

My first live experience with Indian hobbyists in a camp setting took place at the annual Indian Days event in a palisaded enclosure near a village just outside of Frankfurt, in the Bundesland of Hessen, Germany, during a preliminary research trip in September 2002. Wisps of smoke and oddly familiar drumming sounds escaped from the carefully guarded site in the tidy German countryside as I parked my car at a respectful distance on the edge of a field yellow with cole seed. Excitement mingled with dread as I faced the prospect of meeting a tribe of amateurs portraying North American life on the frontier: adults playing cowboys and Indians, Europeans indulging in a controversial hobby redolent of neocolonial insensitivities. As I approached the impressive gates, wondering how to gain access, they were flung open by three massive men dressed as nineteenth-century Plains Indians. Inside, I saw colorful figures resplendent in the evening sun, busying themselves around tepees or strutting around, some dancing in the lodge, others chatting, all part of a visually striking creation of other-worldliness. I was mesmerized and rather lost. Conspicuous in my inappropriately modern clothes, I was whisked away to the tepee of the Kitoki who had invited me, Olaf, and covered in a calico dress that, though far too large, would keep me from spoiling the visuals, at least from a temporal perspective.

Olaf represented a Hudson's Bay Company man, a white craftsman. He explained to me that he had chosen a role he felt comfortable with, being a white Hessian and a carpenter in real, everyday life. But it was the Indians that had attracted my curiosity in the first place, both as an anthropologist and as a European, all too familiar myself with dreams and longings for Native North America. It was the Indians who would feature in local newspaper stories, much more so than the trappers or cowboys. It was the Indians that every outsider wondered about or laughed at. It was the Indians who provoked questions that lacked any satisfactory answer. Why would Europeans, as practitioners of a hobby referred to as Indianism or the Indian hobby, feel compelled to spend a weekend acting out Native North American life in a dedicated space such as this palisaded enclosure somewhere in Hessen?¹ Why did such a hobby exist at all? Most Indian hobbyists in Europe are white Europeans who strive to emulate non-white (Native American or First Nations) role models from the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Dressed in replica outfits, they quite literally embody others and seem to fully indulge in satisfying a fascination with North American Indians that, though it has a long history and is widespread in Europe, is usually expressed more discreetly. Why go this far? Why not simply read a book about them or have the courtesy to travel back in time in the dress appropriate to one's own history, as Olaf did as a trapper?

Indianism is a controversial example of playing at cultures that (by all conventional standards) belong elsewhere and to someone else. By staging microcosms embedded in ideas on authenticity and expertise, Indian hobbyists dress an old-fashioned antiquarian perspective on indigenous material cultures in layers of identity play that seem to epitomize today's anthropological concerns with translocality, appropriation, and hybridity. While trying their best at playing a Lakota or a Mohawk, hobbyists are bound to also play themselves—that is, they perform aspects of their own identities as hobbyists, as Europeans, or as Germans or Czechs, or as Saxons, depending on the specific play frame (see chapter 3) at work. In doing so, they may be supposed to accommodate otherness into existing cognitive frameworks (including stereotypes) shaped by collective memory, individual experience and study, ethical and aesthetical considerations, and interaction with professional ethnologists, contemporary Native Americans, and hobbyists involved in similar historical play communities. Issues of identity and authenticity loomed large the moment I walked into the enclosure, and I suspected that addressing these would be key to an understanding of the Indian hobby as a distinct form of serious leisure. But perhaps more intriguingly, the obviousness of being struck, or being taken aback, by Indianism must speak to our conception of an authentic and ethical European self—and must not be taken for granted. Why is it that the Indian hobby strikes us as especially striking?

The weekend visit with the Kitokis foreshadowed many themes that were to become central to my investigation of Indian hobbyism: the different ways both insiders and outsiders conceptualize the hobby, the networks within and in between which hobbyists choose to operate, the fascination with material culture and the desire to expertly replicate it, and the ambiguous interplay of play and non-play in camp life all came up in informal discussions with my hosts. It was not until after my visit, however, that I realized that I had spent almost the entire afternoon and evening talking to HBC men and trappers, watching the Indians from a distance. Whereas the trappers good-naturedly approached the visitor for a friendly chat, much more courage seemed to be called for on my part to strike up a conversation with one of the Indian hobbyists. They struck me as rather aloof. But quite apart from their apparent reserve, the Indianists intimidated me simply because of their appearance. I found them so exotic and yet so familiar in their breechclouts and with their forbidding demeanor that any attempt at conversation would have had to involve their Indianness, their being different from the others, whom I found more reassuring, like actors in period costume. Trying to talk to the Indian hobbyists would be as embarrassing as trying to talk to real Indians out of curiosity about their otherness. Obviously, I was struggling with my own fascination with the North American Indian and postponing the interactions that were bound to become central to my research project.

Almost two years later, at another venue, I mentioned my first impressions of awe to the Kitoki chief. Instead of taking my remarks as a compliment (in spite of their whiteness, the Indians had struck me as unnervingly real, after all), he deplored what he perceived as an image problem in the hobby: Indianists' reserved attitude threw up barriers to positive attention from outsiders, and also to recruitment of new members into the Indian hobby. In other words, a desire for authentic reenactment interfered with hobbyist realities.

Following my encounter with the Kitokis, I carried out fieldwork from January 2003 until June 2004 in Germany, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, and the Czech Republic, where I visited and participated in Indianist events and interviewed hobbyists at home, at work, or in their tepees in Indianist playgrounds. As became apparent both from their discourse and my experience with hobbyist practices, the Indianist community in Europe is by no means a homogeneous or a neatly demarcated entity. Regional histories and identities, membership in networks—in some cases extending into North America, where the Indian hobby is practiced mostly by Euro-Americans—that overlap with similar hobby networks, and diverging opinions among participants on the nature of the Indian hobby play out not only in Indianists' assessment of Indianism and of what constitutes the good hobby, but also in self-reflective campfire tales and theatrical stagings within hobbyist play frames.

Estimates of numbers of European Indianists vary widely. Several thousands of Indian hobbyists are active in Germany, where hobbyists are neatly organized in clubs and umbrella organizations and thus easier to trace than elsewhere.² At the other end of the spectrum, in the Netherlands, I managed to find only a handful of individually operating, informally connected Indianists, and only one club peopled by trappers with Indian wives. For each of these Indianists engaging in crafts and reenactment, however, many more individuals exist who participate in another, perhaps less extraordinary form of Indianthusiasm. Rather than attempting to strive for a complete or statistically supported overview of the Indian hobbyist phenomenon in the countries where I conducted my fieldwork, I will concentrate in this book on a limited number of clubs and individuals belonging to a few partly overlapping networks with their own annual events.

The selection of countries in which my fieldwork took place was a matter of course and practical feasibility rather than the result of premeditated action. With eastern Germany as my main starting point, contacts with hobbyist networks happened to lead me into various other countries. Drawing conversations and experiences from different places into my account mirrors Indianist practices: apart from maintaining contact by telephone or e-mail, Indianists may travel a long way to an event or to friends in the hobby whenever they expect to derive a worthwhile experience from doing so. Such contacts may be quite international, as was exemplified by the Kitokis' Indian Days event: among the dozens of vans and older-looking cars (not the kind that whiz by in the left-hand lane of the autobahn) parked along the field, I spotted Dutch, Swiss, and French license plates.

The concept of play, which I have mentioned several times in this introduction as a matter of course, was a major element in the conceptual framework I used to gain insight into the phenomenon under study. Whether it was a useful concept turned out to be one of the most interesting questions in my research project. An attempt at an answer may contribute in various ways to the anthropological discourse on identity and identity construction and on the related concepts of appropriation and authenticity. Moreover, I hope that this book will serve to hold a mirror up to the discipline of anthropology by exploring a practice of people who, though they seem to share much of the anthropologist's curiosity for otherness, learn about their object of curiosity through very different methods.

Overview of Themes

In the following chapters, I will introduce several themes and use them to frame Indian hobbyism, showing how this salient practice invites both insiders and outsiders to remap conceptual pairs that we tend to take for granted: amateurism versus professionalism, reality versus play, imitation and creativity, the fake and the authentic, the imaginary and the material, being and appearing, and even right and wrong—pairs that are in many ways central and dear to the discipline of anthropology. In fact, there is something profoundly paradoxical about the saliency of Indianism as something out of the ordinary, in that it resonates with several familiar issues about which both participants and observers feel strongly, and on which they agree and disagree in sometimes surprising ways.

In chapter 1, I will situate Indian hobbyism, or Indianism, in a larger context of expressions of contemporary Indianthusiasm in Europe, focusing on the Netherlands as a case study with the aim of carving out a conceptual niche for this particular practice. In the scarce literature on Indian hobbyism, it is often blended in with practices such as New Ageism, neo-shamanism, or European powwowing. Such an approach tends to obfuscate a key aspect of the hobby, which is its focus on materials and skills: Indian hobbyism is about the making of expertly crafted replicas that come to life in highly organized landscapes. Chapter 2 presents a history of the phenomenon and an overview of its treatment in the literature in connection with a more general European history of fascination with the North American Indian. The emphasis here is on regional and national differences that have come to characterize Indianism in Europe, which point to multiple histories of the Indian hobby rather than to a homogeneous account. We will also meet Indianists who occupy a niche in their Indianist community as local amateur historians of the hobby and prove to be eloquent discussion partners on the ways in which Indianism has shaped, and still shapes, local perceptions of selves and others. Chapter 3 takes the reader into the field. We travel to various Indianist gatherings in Germany and Belgium and experience the pleasures, challenges, and irritations of camp life close up. The chapter looks at Indianism from the perspective of metacommunication, frame analysis, and play, and ends with an embodiment of these themes in the shape of a diary that I wrote for participants at the 2003 Buffalo Days Camp.

In chapter 4, the academy as the prime bastion of worthwhile knowledge comes under siege in a discursive battle between amateurs and professionals. Indianism is practiced as a form of serious leisure and a quest for knowledge by amateurs whose methods are often criticized by a professional community operating in a parallel universe. I argue that the Indian hobby may be considered as a point of intersection where different (epistemological) traditions meet, as Indian hobbyists draw on, and enact, a hybrid reservoir of indigenous and European knowledge systems and art forms. I will distinguish two heuristic approaches favored by different networks of Indianists that are closely related to their divergent perceptions of play, one more cerebral in nature, the other more experience-based. By pointing out parallels with other knowledge traditions showing a similar dichotomy, I draw attention to a more widespread ambivalence concerning the notion of play and its association with imitation in European discourse and heuristic practice.

In their desire to display and generate knowledge and know-how, Indianists take as their models not only Native Americans, but also experts in the hobby and professional students of Native American cultures. This three-pronged emulation, realized through skilled replica making and historically correct reenactment, evokes questions of authenticity and identity, which are explored in chapter 5. Drawing on art-historical literature on forgery and duplication and on debates on the politics of identity, I show how neat categories of real and fake researchers, Indians, and objects start blurring at the edges. It turns out that hobbyists use the term authenticity to characterize their replicas and stagings in the present. Authenticity in European Indianist usage, then, is located in the relationship between Indianist output and the historical model rather than in an idealized other. Building on my findings from ethnography, I take issue with the (often vilified) concept of nostalgia by emphasizing the dynamic and creative spatiotemporal forces that come into play in practices of reenactment through the tension between an interest turned toward the past and its contemporary staging.

The impact of this staging springs from its ability to resonate with different worlds of experience and express and inspire wonder at the same time. In chapter 6, I discuss the metonymical workings of the Indianist playground by drawing parallels between, on the one hand, a Western preoccupation with representation and, on the other, practices of display and skilled perception in the Indian hobby, while emphasizing the hobby's groundedness in materials and things. In this final chapter, we will see why Indianism is said to be just like railway modeling, and why it is said not to be like railway modeling at all. By then, it will have been called many names, and this assertion should sound less enigmatic than it probably does now.

Notes

1. In anglophone literature, the terms Indian hobby (Indian hobbyists) and Indianism (Indianists) are used. Indian hobbyism exists in the United States as well (see Deloria 1998). Practitioners in Europe often simply refer to the hobby (das Hobby, le hobby, de/het hobby in German, French, Dutch/Flemish respectively). In eastern Germany, Indianistik, Indianist, and Indianerfreund (friend of the Indians) are used more often than in western Germany. Some Indianists feel that the epithet hobbyist does not do justice to the seriousness and earnestness of their practice; Indianistik has a scholarly ring, comparable to Amerikanistik (cf. Schultze 2004: 7). My French-speaking informants would also use the term Indianisme and Indianistes. Dutch speakers use Indianen-hobby, hobbyist, Indianenvriend (friend of the Indians,) or Indianist. Czech discussion partners considered a term such as Indianist somewhat presumptuous; hobbyist would do.

2. Five thousand according to Asten (2002: 63); between ten and twenty thousand according to Feest (2002: 31). Veteran hobbyist Max Oliv (18 February 2004), former president of the Westernbund, estimated in an interview that about 160–180 clubs were members of the Westernbund, totaling about two thousand individual participants. In an interview the chief of the Indianistikbund (25 February 2003) mentioned that about one thousand Indianists would participate at the annual Indian Week in eastern Germany.

CHAPTER 1

Setting the Stage

Indianism and What It Is Not

Reality in a world, like realism in a picture,

is largely a matter of habit.

—Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking

All over Europe, passionate amateurs invest time, effort, and love in re-creating scenes from a Native American past. Most numerous and active in Germany, these so-called Indian hobbyists or Indianists draw on ethnographies of North American Indians, travel diaries, paintings and photographs, how-to books, and faraway and perhaps imaginary landscapes and role models to sustain what has become an epistemological and performative practice with its own local traditions and dynamics. Organized in more or less tightly knit play communities, Indian hobbyists manufacture, display, wear, and use homemade replicas of eighteenth-or nineteenth-century garb and artifacts on playgrounds dotted with tepees (illus. 1.1) in an attempt to create visual, palpable, olfactory, gustatory, aural, and kinesthetic impressions of Native American or Canadian material cultures as they imagine these to have existed in the past. Since the establishment of the first Indian hobby clubs in the 1920s in Germany, Indianists have come to conceive of their hobby as a quest for knowledge. The drive behind the hobby is to try to understand material culture through experimentation. While fun and pleasure are often mentioned as an important reason for participating in the hobby, trying to get things right and be accepted by more experienced or gifted hobbyists may be a source of stress and frustration as well. The professed goal of the hobby is for participants to get a feel for how life was lived in the woodlands or on the plains back in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, respectively—which does not necessarily preclude singing folk songs around the campfire, organizing canoe trips with an Indian theme, or showing an interest in contemporary Native America.

Illustration 1.1. Indian Week 2003, Thuringia

Indianism as a Subset of Indianthusiasm

So how does this practice mesh with, to name a few examples, the small-business enterprise of a Dutchman performing Indian stories in a tepee pitched in Noord-Holland, the zeal of an activist claiming to feel a spiritual connection with Native Americans, or the delicate touch of a battle reenactor talking me through the materials he carefully selected for his Iroquois trapper's outfit? Indianists share the stage with thousands of Europeans who are active in other scenes that have a link with Native America, such as the characters I just mentioned, whom we will meet in more detail below. Many different practices, from contemporary powwowing to black-powder shooting to New Age drumming, have some overlap with the Indian hobby proper. Moreover, insiders may not always agree on what kind of an amateur should be considered an Indian hobbyist, let alone on what would constitute the good Indian hobbyist, with all the moral overtones that this implies.

A discussion of Indianism would be a muddled affair without an attempt to clarify where insiders position themselves within this wider spectrum. We need to know both what sets Indian hobbyism apart (as an experience) and what is perceived to set it apart (as a phenomenon) from other expressions of interest in Native America in order to understand why it seems especially prone to provoke mirth or disapproval in outsiders and pleasure or stress in insiders. Singling out the phenomenon as a distinct category will of necessity remain a somewhat artificial exercise, as even Indianists do not always agree on the core activities and values of their hobby. Moreover, trying to zoom in on the typical features of Indian hobbyism carries the risk of fostering stereotypical images of the Indian hobbyist. The interest of this exercise lies in unraveling the discourse about Indianism by addressing some of the most tenacious misunderstandings that transpire from outsider perceptions of the hobby, and in paving the way for a discussion of identity-through-performance.

A useful term to invoke here is Indianthusiasm, coined by Hartmut Lutz, a professor of Native American studies in Greifswald, to refer to all kinds of nonpolitical expressions of interest in historical or imaginary North American Indians among European, especially German, amateurs. He defines his term, translated from what he calls in German Indianertümelei, as follows:

The term Indianertümelei signifies a yearning for all things Indian, a fascination with American Indians, a romanticizing about a supposed Indian essence, or, for want of a better translation that catches the ironic ambiguities of the German term, an Indianthusiasm.…German Indianthusiasm is racialized in that it refers to Indianness [Indianertum] as an essentializing bioracial and, concomitantly, cultural ethnic identity that ossifies into stereotype. It tends to historicize Indians as figures of the past, and it assumes that anybody truly Indian will follow cultural practices and resemble in clothing and physiognomy First Nations people before or during first contact. Relatively seldom does Indianertümelei focus on contemporary Native American realities.¹ (Lutz 2002: 168–69)

Lutz, then, speaks of practices that are problematic and tainted by stereotypical conceptions of the Indian (usually the Plains Indian), a European construction in itself.² In what follows, I will take the liberty to extend his very convenient and catchy term to a much wider realm. In my usage of it, for now leaving aside some possibly essentializing and historicizing aspects of the practices under discussion, I will consider not only the Indian hobby, but also European activism on behalf of Native Americans or professional interest in North American Indians as expressions of Indianthusiasm. I find it useful to do so because these practices, even if they differ significantly in content and focus, arguably sprang from a shared history of ideas and images that have become part of European consciousness.³ In my communication with European activists and (museum or university) professionals, they often implied or expressed a motivation for being involved with Native American cultures that they could not always rationalize and that seemed to be rooted (almost in spite of themselves) in a long European tradition of contact and fascination with North American Indian cultures as distinct from other indigenous cultures. In their personal stories, they would recall having played Indian or savored romantic novels about the West before becoming involved in the subject matter in a more serious and responsible manner—a coming-of-age that is often mirrored in Indian hobbyists’ personal accounts as a transition from beginner to expert.⁴

I will carve out this conceptual niche for Indian hobbyism by giving a short overview of different forms of Indianthusiasm in my country of origin, the Netherlands.⁵ I spent quite some time looking for Dutch Indianists, who proved to be scarce on the ground. Instead, I encountered many people involved in or fascinated by things Indian who would not consider themselves Indian hobbyists and often, in fact, reacted disdainfully to any mention of the phenomenon. Self-identifying terms that surfaced in interviews with these other enthusiasts were, rather than Indian hobbyists, Indianenvrienden (friends of the Indians), Indianenliefhebbers (amateurs of the Indians), and Indianenfreaks (Indian buffs or enthusiasts). By approaching the phenomenon from outsiders’ perspectives, I hope to paint a picture of discourses that Indian hobbyists are in general well aware of, and which they actively use in constructing and verbalizing their own identities as distinctive actors competing for a slice of the excitement and prestige that involvement with Native America still tends to convey in Europe.

At the same time, painting a picture of Dutch Indianthusiasm will provide an impression of a Dutch outlook and mentality in which I inevitably partake as a product of Dutch society, despite having spent a considerable part of my adult life abroad. Thus, an overview of Dutch Indianthusiasm both draws on and illustrates my status in part of this research project as a native anthropologist who enjoyed TV series about the American West and played cowboy as a child. This being said, most of my Dutch examples of Indianthusiasm have equivalents in other European countries, which makes the following overview safe to resonate more broadly throughout this book as a sample of the wider Indianthusiast context in which European Indianists perform their specific practice.

Dutch Indianthusiasm: Support Groups

beyond Beads and Feathers

Several small-scale support groups for North American Indians are active in the Netherlands. Some of them share a founding history but parted ways as a result of differences over goals, philosophy, or strategy. In light of the shrinking popular interest in Native American issues, mentioned by most representatives of these groups, they have become competitors for members and sponsors. In early 2003 I spoke with the presidents of De Kiva, NANAI, Lakotastichting, Arctic Peoples Alert, and Wolakota Stichting,⁶ all located in the western, densely urbanized part of the Netherlands, and asked them to elaborate on their groups’ history, goals, and membership, as well as their experience with what I tentatively called Indianenspel (Indian play) or Indianisme (Indianism) and described as the expression of a historically focused interest in Native American cultures through craftwork, dress, and reenactment.

The oldest support group for North American Indians in the Netherlands is De Kiva, which was founded in 1963 and has published an informative magazine with historically and ethnographically oriented contributions ever since (cf. Taylor 1988). The founder of De Kiva, Mr. Heijink, had had contacts with Dutch anthropologist Herman F. C. ten Kate Jr. (1858–1931), who carried out physical-anthropological and ethnolinguistic research among Native American tribes and collected ethnographica for the ethnology museum (Museum voor Volkenkunde) in Leiden.⁷ One long-time Kiva member had personally witnessed performances by show Indians touring with Buffalo Bill and the German Circus Sarrasani; as we will see, such Native American performances were a major impulse for the foundation of the first hobbyist clubs in Europe.

De Kiva currently focuses more on contemporary issues concerning Native Americans and First Peoples and is involved in small-scale aid projects, especially to stimulate the continuing use of Native American languages. At the annual Kiva Day that I attended in the fall of 2003, elaborate presentations on travel experiences in Indian Country alternated with reports on aid projects. A bookstand with an impressive collection of literature on Native Americans (including many English titles) did good business. Two Dutch women selling crafts on behalf of associates living on a Native American reservation shared the space with a Dutch artist who made portraits of Native Americans and animals. One Kiva member told me she was interested in beadwork and had once organized a craft workshop.

In 1972, as Native American activism started to receive international attention, a Kiva member who wanted to be more actively involved in aid projects founded the NANAI support group. NANAI publishes NANAI Notes, a newsletter focusing on contemporary Native Peoples in North America. In tune with contemporary trends in Dutch society, its focus became pragmatic rather than idealistic, with a humanitarian rather than an activist focus. Sponsors of NANAI (the foundation has no members) had very different backgrounds, I was told, as did members of De Kiva. They often harbored rather romantic ideas about Native Americans, NANAI's president mentioned, which was part of the attraction of supporting NANAI. To illustrate NANAI's pragmatic and flexible approach, he stressed that the organization did not eschew collaboration with non-activist and even commercial enterprises if this helped promote interest in and support for Native American projects. One example was NANAI's collaboration with the Dutch teller of Indian stories who performed in a tepee.

The Lakota Stichting (Lakota Foundation) was founded in 1989 by a member of both NANAI and De Kiva with the aim of organizing responsible trips to Lakota homelands. According to the website, participants in these travel projects have the unique opportunity to enter into direct contact with Native Americans, their culture, contemporary way of life, self-image, and history.

Arctic Peoples Alert is the support group with the clearest activist profile. It originated in a project in which both De Kiva and NANAI participated and evolved into a protest movement against military low-flying exercises above Innu land in Labrador and Québec, in which the Dutch air force participated. When low flying became less of a priority toward the end of the 1990s, attention shifted to other problems faced by indigenous peoples in arctic regions.

Finally, I contacted the Wolakota Stichting, a foundation dedicated to the support of the Steiner School for Lakota Children on the Pine Ridge reservation in North Dakota. Eric Sellmeijer, one of the two Dutch initiators and directors of the foundation, told me he felt a spiritual connection with Native Americans that he considered part of his identity. He spoke at length about his close friendship with a traditional Santi Dakota, whom he had visited several times. He had started out with a rather romantic, stereotypical image of the North American Indian as personified, for example, by Winnetou, the noble Apache in the late nineteenth-century adventure novels by Karl May. This German author is very often mentioned in connection with European Indianthusiasm, both in literature on the subject and by different brands of enthusiasts, including Indianists, often as a source of pleasure and excitement in which they indulged during their youth.⁸

Sellmeijer, then, shares the genealogy of his interest in Native America with Indianists; also, material aspects of his involvement resonate with the Indianist focus on material culture as I introduced it above. On the walls of his living room, a buffalo skin was on display, as were two watercolors he had painted depicting Native American themes. He had enjoyed fashioning a pipe bag and a beaded pouch adorned with a Dutch symbol, the tulip. In fact, his interest in Native Americans was expressed both through his involvement in the Wolakota support group and through his pleasure in owning and fashioning Native American artifacts and images. He was puzzled, however, by the apparent need for dressing up displayed by some admirers of Native American cultures, although he took pleasure in wearing a bowtie and a beaded ornament his Santi Dakota friend had given him.⁹

My other discussion partners representing Dutch support groups expressed similar concerns with Indianism as a practice that involved non-Native people dressing up as Native Americans. Why don't these people just act normally? one sighed. For want of a better term, another referred to it as Indiaantje spelen (playing Indian, with a childlike connotation implied in the diminutive Indiaantje) and criticized Indianists for not being interested in what really mattered—namely, contemporary Native American issues. De Kiva's president was more nuanced when asked about Indian hobbyism. In former days, he told me, part of the membership enjoyed making nineteenth-century-inspired costumes and artifacts, but this practice had been all but abandoned by active Kiva members.¹⁰ Perhaps, he suggested, the Dutch, lacking German romanticism, were too down-to-earth for real hobbyism (that is, replica making and dressing up). As far as he knew, they tended to dismiss such practices as a nonserious preoccupation with feathers and beads. The president of the Lakota Stichting, who was otherwise quite critical of Indian hobbyism, told me she could not help admiring some of the replicas she had seen on eBay.

Dutch Indianthusiasm: Idealist Pragmatics

in Commercial Enterprise

The Dutch have often been characterized as a merchant people combining a businesslike, pragmatic mentality with humanitarian ideals derived from Calvinism.¹¹ In my search for commercial arenas of Indianthusiasm, I came across a number of arts and crafts and New Age—oriented shops that had equivalents in all of my fieldwork countries, but I was also introduced to two commercial players that struck me as typically Dutch. Walas BV and Sunka Tanka were commercial ventures driven by, as I was told, strong yet pragmatic principles.

Walas BV

I got my first impression of Walas BV from an attractive magazine the company produces for children, Baribal, which many of my informants praised for the quality of its design and content. Its goal, I was told by the managing director, was to show children that indigenous cultures were very much alive and to offer an alternative image to the usual presentation in museums, where such cultures were, in her opinion, often framed as something of the past. In primary schools and community centers, young children in the Netherlands are regularly exposed to popular representations of Indians that do not attempt to problematize easy stereotypes. In the Heemskerk local paper, Zondag Ochtendblad (23 February 2003), I read an announcement of Indian days, where the promised activities included making headdresses and dream catchers, braiding hair, painting tepees, storytelling, and savoring Indian snacks. Friends in Overschie, near Rotterdam, told me about an Indian day at their children's primary school, where they were encouraged to decorate T-shirts with fringes and paint, fashion necklaces out of feathers and gutted pens, search for a hidden totem pole, and stretch fabric over flowerpots to make drums. Another, weeklong community event for children organized by the Stichting Welzijn Overschie (Well-Being Foundation Overschie) involved wigwams and Indian dances.

Walas aimed for something different. The company claimed to have particular expertise on Northwest Coast cultures thanks to its business partnership with the U'Mista Cultural Centre in Alert Bay, British Columbia. Each issue of Baribal contained an introduction by a young artist from Alert Bay, Joe Wilson, who was presented as the magazine's patron and the head of the Baribal Indian club (Indianenclub). The company's very attractive premises, which I visited in July 2003 in Amersfoort, were decorated with Northwest Coast art. Walas BV was dedicated to broadening existing knowledge about traditional peoples, in particular by focusing on their special relationship with nature, since nature, according to Walas management, was an easily understandable concept that lent itself well as a vehicle for knowledge transfer. As adults tended to associate Native people with New Age practices, or to be content with playing Indian, Walas assumed a focus on children to be most effective in changing existing attitudes toward Indianness. The managing director had the impression that Germans tended to be more knowledgeable about traditional peoples than the Dutch and more motivated to find out how things really were.

With its involvement in educational projects, Walas BV strove to contribute to responsible yet profitable dissemination of culturally appealing information by adopting a broker's role between representatives of First Nations and Dutch leisure providers. With its emphasis on Northwest Coast art and imagery, it promoted a less common object for Indianthusiasm—typically, European Indianthusiasm is reserved for Plains Indians, who are associated with feelings of nostalgia, exoticism, and romanticism rather than with stylized art suited to contemporary Western aesthetic sensibilities.¹² After the meeting in Amersfoort, I visited three venues in which Walas BV had had an organizational or advisory role.¹³ I was told that they had withdrawn their cooperation from two of the projects when they felt the authenticity of the displays was being compromised, in one case through a lack of continuing collaboration with First Nations representatives and in the other because of an opening ceremony involving fake Indians. Walas representatives would never don Native American clothing.

Sunka Tanka

In the early spring of 2004, I had another intriguing encounter with two Dutchmen with a passion for Native American cultures that was expressed in a creatively commercial manner that