Ethnographic Novels: American Indians in Francophone Comics

Abstract

European interest for American Indian cultures has become a much-discussed research subject, especially in the realm of cultural appropriation, identification, and, in broad terms, under Said’s “Orientalism.” One string of this interest follows the phenomenon of hobbyists, in concordance with the idea of “playing Indian,” which has a long, yet different tradition in the United States.¹ The other string focuses on literary representations of American Indians. To borrow Philip Deloria’s concept of “expectations” of others—“shorthand for the dense economies of meaning, representation, and act that have inflected both [European] culture writ large and individuals, both Indian and non-Indian”²—much of this research has created its own expectations of European expectations of American Indians. The sight of Indians in Europe as well as Europeans who “play” Indians has become almost expected, in the sense that Europeans who show interest in Native American cultures are often stereotypically assumed to have acquired this interest because they read Karl May and want to become shamans. As with most expectations, there is, of course, some truth to this; however, reality extends beyond clichés, and these assumptions ignore the complex interplay between European and Native expectations and knowledge of each other.³