Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1800

Acknowledgments

xv Acknowledgments If I had known that this book would take so long to complete, I might well have pursued something else: a life history, a state history, a take on an era, something with a more explicit beginning, middle, and end. There were many times when I cursed myself for not choosing a topic with a finite set of sources located in a tidy, accessible archive. Transnational and transcultural histories, I quickly learned, pose particular challenges—but they also offer significant rewards. Pursuing this project, for example, forced me to engage a range of unanticipated topics: German settler colonialism in the American Midwest, the rise and fall of German America, and the transnational world of American Indian performers and postwar activists, not to mention comparative genocides, persistent notions of masculinity, and the ways in which a range of American Indians helped to channel and shape German notions of human difference. Perhaps most importantly, this project has pushed me to think hard about the relationships between continuities and ruptures in modern German history and to rethink the ways in which we conceive of and write cultural history. I am grateful that I had the chance to engage in this research, particularly because it put me in contact with so many generous people. I am also thankful for the institutional support I received and for the insights I gleaned into American Indian studies, American history, and many new realms of German and European history. Those areas were only at the margins of my earlier inquiries; they were simply sparks of ideas I had gleaned from conversations with Peter Fritzsche and George Mosse, until I had the opportunity to pursue them directly. That opportunity was created through the support of the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Contemporary Historical Research (ZZF) in Potsdam, The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation at Brown xvi Acknowledgments University, the German Academic Exchange, the German Historical Institution in Washington, D.C., the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The University of Missouri Research Board supported my initial inquiries, while the University of Iowa’s International Programs and Arts and Humanities Initiative proved crucial along the way. I could never have completed all the necessary research trips without them. I am particularly indebted to the University of Iowa for granting me a Faculty Scholar Fellowship. That fantastic program allowed me to develop the project to its full potential. Without it, this book would have taken much longer to complete. The number of people who eagerly assisted me is so large that I cannot list them all here. Countless archivists and librarians aided me, and many scholars helped me along the way. I am grateful for their assistance. I benefited from comments on earlier versions of these chapters during meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the American Historical Association, the American Indian Workshop, the American Society for Ethnohistory, and the German Studies Association, as well as presentations in Berlin, Erfurt, Konstanz, Minneapolis, Munich, Montreal, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Potsdam , Seville, Washington, D.C., and Iowa City. The diverse and engaged publics that showed up to my presentations on the Dakota Conflict at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota were especially heartening and instructive. So too were the students at the University of Minnesota in Morris. Indeed, the striking number of people from outside academics who have assisted me has been humbling. They have greatly enriched this book. People such as Ted Asten, Bernd Damisch, Joachim Giel, Max Oliv, and Wolfgang Seifert invited me into their homes, fed me, looked through materials with me, and introduced me to numerous interlocutors. Chuck Trimble offered me much more of his time than I ever could have expected. So too did Arthur Amiotte, Klaus Biegrt, Curtis Dahlin, Ann Davis, Joe and Janice Day, Richard Erdoes, Roswitha Freier, Andre Köhler, John LaBatte, Nick McCaffery, Lindberg Namingha, Angelika Powell, Uli Sanner, Cindy Sapp, Milo Yellowhair , Joe Whiting, Gerry Wunderlich, and so many others. A special word of thanks has to go to Hartmut and Heidi Rietschel. Their kindness and generosity seems boundless, their enthusiasm for the topic endless, and Hartmut’s knowledge of American Indians’ activities in Europe is simply astonishing; he never ceases to amaze. Respekt. A number of my colleagues also deserve special thanks. Everything would have been much, much harder without the openness and assistance of Peter Bolz, who I suspect knows much more...