Aboriginal Canada Revisited

THE IMAGINARY INDIAN IN GERMAN CHILDREN'S NON-FICTION LITERATURE

Genevieve Susemihl THE IMAGINARYINDIAN IN GERMAN CHILDREN'SNON-FICTION LITERATURE he stereotypical image of Native people among German children andyoungadultsisthat ofthe PlainsIndian.TheIndianisamounted warrior andbuffalo hunter, who rides through the endless prairies, wearing war paint and aheaddress, dwells in a tipi, and sits around the campfire in a dignified manner, smoking a peace pipe. Even small children have a firm picture of an Indian and instantly recognize the stylized mounted chief in fringed buckskin as Karl May's "Winnetou" and the Indian girl with long black hair as Pocahontas. This essay explores the images of North American Native people in German children's non-fiction literature and examines how these limited and partly distorted perceptions of Native people affect young people.After looking at the general image German children and young adults have ofNative people, Iwill discusssamples ofchildrensnon-fiction literature that contain stereotypical representations ofNative people. THE IMAGE OF THE INDIAN IN THE WORLD OFCHILDREN Generally, children's perceptions of Native people are formed by a variety of sources, including teachers, parents, museum displays, food packages, advertisements, toys, and books. German children learn from these sources 122 t III!, i MA bi N A k •• !N D! A N that Native people always wear feathered headdresses, frequently brandish tomahawks, and live in tipis. These images play a crucial role in distorting their attitudes toward Native people, since, accordingto Kenneth Clark, ... children's attitudes toward [Native people] are determined chiefly not by contact with [Native people], but by contact with the prevailing attitudes towards [Native people]. It is not the [Native person], but the idea of the [Native person] that influences children. (Clark qtd. in Moore/Hirschfelder 1981,8) By being continuously exposed to the stereotyped images of Native people in books, television programs, movies, and toys, all of which are reinforced by the societal discourse,young children internalize these images; eventually they develop attitudes toward Native people that areunrealistic and incorrect, but that will remain with them throughout adulthood. A recent sample survey I conducted with seventy-six university students1 between the ages ofnineteen and thirty-two confirmed that the romanticized "Plains Indian"remains the predominant German stereotypical Indian among young adults in Germany. The vast majority of students associated Native people with "hunting buffalo with bow and arrow" (82 percent); "living in tipis in the prairies" (81 percent); "unfair suffering" (71percent); "adventure" (68 percent); "stories at the camp fire" (61 percent) and "brave warriors, riding on horseback" (60 percent). The typical "Indian" is also identified as having "long, black hair" (97 percent); is "friendly and civilized" (52 percent), as well as "brave, courageous and heroic" (51 percent). More than half of the students further associated Indians with the fictional characters "Winnetou" and "Old Shatterhand"2 (64 percent), and only about a third of them with "agriculture and farming" (32 percent), "dwellings made out of adobe, grass or earth" (36percent), and "democracy" (11 percent). The best-known Native leaders among the participants of the survey are Sitting Bull (34 percent), Geronimo (8 percent) and the fictional Winnetou (8 percent). While about a fifth of the students believe that Winnetou really existed, about half of the students take Pocahontas for a fictional character. The best known nations are Winnetous Apaches (63 percent), Sitting Bulls Sioux (62 percent), 123 GENEVIEVE SUSEMIHL and the Iroquois (25percent). The students predominantly claim that their knowledge about Native people comes from Winnetou films (81 percent) and other feature films (75percent), novels by Karl May (69 percent), television documentaries (62percent), non-fiction (54 percent), and fiction books (50 percent). Less than half of them learned about Native people at school, from the Internet, museums, relatives, or trips to North America. This survey shows that today, approximately twenty-five years after Hartmut Lutzs study on "Indianer" und "Native Americans" (1985), the picture has not fundamentallychanged. The stereotype of Native people in the world of German children and young people is that of the Indian of the past, wearing traditional clothing and engaged in traditional activities. This can also be confirmed by an empirical study ofthe existing stereotypical image of Native people in Germany conducted by Sebastian Krebes in 2002, in which 179German junior high and high school students between the ages of twelve and twenty participated (appendix A). Comparing his results with the survey conducted by Hartmut Lutz in 1977-78, Krebes observed that the students' answers in both surveys were rather homogeneous, and that the...