Whatever the reasons for their visits to Europe might have been, American Indians quickly found themselves treated as objects of curiosity. The commercialization of cultural differences reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when competing entrepreneurs brought American Indians and other exotic groups to Europe. During his eight years' residence in London and Paris, the American artist George Catlin promoted interest in his gallery of American Indian paintings by employing Native American dance troupes. By far the largest number of Indians in Europe in the twentieth century, however, have come from the ranks of the "Indian clubs" that have flourished from England to Russia and from Scandinavia to Italy. These clubs represent the "tribalization" of European Indian hobbyism, the attempt to emulate American Indian philosophy and life-styles, an effort that is rooted in a long-standing Western primitivist reaction to industrialization and urban life. Houghton Mifflin Company, College Division (Estados Unidos de América), 1 de septiembre de 2004.

Over the past five centuries, thousands of American Indians have come to Europe. Although they did not come as conquerors, and often arrived rather as members of conquered peoples, their impact on Europeans goes far beyond the limited scope of their physical transatlantic presence. Stereotypical images of the "Indian," ranging from the noble savage to the savage brute, were created in Europe only in small part on the basis of personal encounters with Native Americans; for the most part they were adapted from classical and medieval views of cultural "otherness" according to their creators' ever-changing needs. American Indian visitors to Europe were more affected by European visions of the "Indian" than they were effective in creating those visions.

Columbus was only the first explorer to abduct American Indians and present them in Europe as proof of his transatlantic discoveries and of the potential usefulness of these people to Europeans. In 1501, the king of Portugal was reportedly pleased at the sight of a group of above-average-sized natives of Newfoundland, whom he intended to use as slaves. Hundreds of Native Americans were shipped to Europe for that very purpose in the first decades of the sixteenth century. The practice was largely abandoned when American Indians turned out to be especially susceptible to European diseases, but the trade continued into the seventeenth century. In 1614, for example, the ship captain Thomas Hunt kidnapped twenty-four native New Englanders, including the famous Squanto, and sold them in Málaga to the Spaniards.

Others were carried to Europe to document the need to "civilize" and convert the aboriginal North Americans, or to arouse European interest in the New World's resources, and thus to support the colonial enterprise. Jacques Cartier, the French explorer of the St. Lawrence River, specifically trapped the Iroquois chief Donnacona on his ship in 1536, "that he might relate and tell to the king all he has seen in the west of the wonders of the world." At the same time it was hoped that Native American visitors to Europe would be favorably impressed by the splendors of the Continent and the power of its monarchs. As Indians themselves became increasingly curious about the land whence the white men had come, it was no longer necessary to forcibly take them abroad.

After the sixteenth century, Native Americans were also brought to Europe to receive an education that would enable them to act as teachers and diplomats. Some were trained in Rome for the priesthood in order to become missionaries among their own people. In the twentieth century, American Indian soldiers fighting in the Great War against the German "Huns" were sometimes cited as an example of how other savages had already been redeemed by civilization.

In the eighteenth century, Native American politicians began to visit Europe regularly. Three Mohawks and a Mohegan touted as "the Four Kings of Canada" paid a much publicized visit to Queen Anne in 1710. With the end of the French and British colonial empires in America such visits became less common, though they have continued into the twentieth century. After failing to obtain British support in the struggle of the hereditary chiefs of the Six Nations against the Canadian government, the Cayuga chief Deskaheh in 1923 submitted "The Redman's Appeal for Justice" to the recently established League of Nations in Geneva. Canadian Indian representatives traveled to England to lobby for native rights when the Canadian constitution was "repatriated" in the 1980s. Since the 1980s, Geneva has become a meeting ground for (generally self-appointed rather than elected) American Indian politicians in connection with the sessions of the United Nations Working Group for Indigenous People. These sessions also draw delegates from the numerous European groups supporting Native American political causes.

Whatever the reasons for their visits to Europe might have been, American Indians quickly found themselves treated as objects of curiosity. They were made to paddle their canoes on local ponds, demonstrate other notable skills, or simply let themselves be looked at for their strange attire or able (if exotic) bodies. The landlord of an establishment that was housing a Cherokee delegation visiting London in 1762 charged admission to the Indians' dressing room, "which gave them [the Indians] the highest disgust, these people having a particular aversion to being stared at while dressing or eating."

The commercialization of cultural differences reached its peak in the nineteenth century, when competing entrepreneurs brought American Indians and other exotic groups to Europe. During his eight years' residence in London and Paris, the American artist George Catlin promoted interest in his gallery of American Indian paintings by employing Native American dance troupes. By far the most successful of these showmen, however, was "Buffalo Bill" Cody, whose Wild West show helped to establish the Sioux as the epitome of "the American Indian" in Europe. The participants in such shows—who had suffered military defeat and were facing economic deprivation on their reservations, and whose numbers included Black Elk, Iron Tail, and some of the leaders of the Ghost Dance movement—were given an opportunity for gainful employment by exhibiting aspects of their traditional culture in front of an enthusiastic and sympathetic audience.

Since a certain conformity with the prevalent stereotype of "the Indian" generally helped showpiece Indians convince their audiences of their authenticity, impostors were often more successful in this business than true Native Americans. William Augustus Bowles, an American loyalist who often dressed as "commander-in-chief of the Creek and Cherokee" Nations, was lionized by London society in 1791; in the 1920s Edgardo Laplante, an Italian American from New York posing as the Iroquois chief White Elk on his way to Geneva, was cheered by the Italian public and received by Mussolini, but was later imprisoned for fraud. Some of the "Indian medicine men" who since around 1980 have begun to fill their European customers' needs for expensive healing ceremonies, sweat lodges, and even Sun Dances, have not always been what they were claiming to be.

By far the largest number of Indians in Europe in the twentieth century, however, have come from the ranks of the "Indian clubs" that have flourished from England to Russia and from Scandinavia to Italy. These clubs represent the "tribalization" of European Indian hobbyism—the attempt to emulate American Indian philosophy and life-styles, an effort that is rooted in a long-standing Western primitivist reaction to industrialization and urban life. During colonial times, French coureurs du bois and British army officers stationed at frontier posts often dressed as Indians and married Native American women. German mercenaries in the American Revolution were surprised to find some of their countrymen installed as Indian chiefs in Nova Scotia and in Florida. Around 1910, the Englishman Archibald Belaney began his transformation into Grey Owl, whose books on nature and conservation made him perhaps the most popular "Indian" in Europe of the 1930s. At the same time Club Manitou was founded in Dresden as one of the first hobbyist groups. Members still meet on weekends or in summer camps, are quite successful in the replication of nineteenth-century Plains Indian costumes, and often explain their hobby by claiming a special mystic relationship between their own people and the American Indians.
 
 

Olive Patricia Dickason, The Myth of the Savage and the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1984); Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Aachen: Rader Verlag, 1987); Carolyn T. Foreman, Indians Abroad: 1493-1938 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943).
Christian F. Feest
Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität
Frankfurt, Germany
 
 
 

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