Abstract
In May 2012 two starkly contrasting kinds of “encounter” occurred between Europeans and North American Indians, both of which fall under the remit of this volume. The first encounter, in the form of Dutch Eurovision pop singer Joan Franka dressed in Plains culture attire, figures what Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish literary critic Louis Owens has called the “damningly hyperreal ‘Indian’”;1 the second, meanwhile, involved a political figure, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) Chief Shawn A-in-chut Atleo, representative of an agency whose real presence, particularly in Europe, has all too frequently been occluded by the presence of the signified “Indian.” That dialectic of absence and presence, codified in what Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor calls the indian, “a simulation of impure imagination,” produces the indian as “a case of cultural nostalgia, the presence of tradition in a chemical civilization”. Natives, thereby, “are secured as the unnameable, an aesthetic niche, the obscure entries on a bourgeois cruise of culture.”2 This volume of essays set out to determine the degree to which these two figures still mark the gulf between the real and the romantic in the European imaginary.3
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Notes
Louis Owens. Mixedblood Messages. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. 18.
Gerald Vizenor. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Presence and Absence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 38.
Queen Elizabeth II. Indian Country Today. May 23, 2012. http://indiancountryto-daymedianetwork.com/2012/05/23/first-nations-meet-with-prince-charles-ask-to-see-queen-elizabeth-ii-114551.
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Robert Warrior, Jace Weaver, and Craig Womack. American Indian Literary Nationalism. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2006.
Maureen Konkle. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827–1863. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004;
Gerald Vizenor and Jill Doerfler. The White Earth Nation: Ratification of a Native Democratic Constitution. New York: SUNY Press, 2013;
Penelope Myrtle Kelsey. Tribal Theory in Native American Literature: Dakota and Haudenosaunee Writing and Worldviews. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008;
Christopher Teuton. Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010;
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Daniel Heath Justice. Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006;
James H. Cox. Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006;.
Gerald Vizenor. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” In Vizenor ed. 2008. 1–24. 11.
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Robert M. Berkhofer. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage, 1979. 93.
Christian Feest ed. Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 2.
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See Petra Tjitske Kalshoven. Crafting “the Indian”: Knowledge and Desire in Indianist Reenactment. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012;
Marta Carlson. “Germans Playing Indian.” In Colin Gordon Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, and Susanne Zantop eds. Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2002;
Katrin Seig. Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002;
Birgit Turski. Indianistikgruppen der DDR: Entwiscklung—Probleme—Aussichten. Idstein/Taunus: Baum, 1994;
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Citilin Avramescu. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. 86.
Christopher Columbus. Log of Christopher Columbus. Trans. Robert H. Fuson. Camden, Maine: International Marine, 1987. 76 and 102.
Jodi A. Byrd. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. xxxiv.
Petra Kalshoven’s Crafting “the Indian,” the index to which makes virtually no reference to current Native scholarship. Although she does engage with Native scholars to some degree in the text, her argument largely treats the field of hobbyism as entirely discrete. For further critique of European academe’s engagement with Native Studies, see Deborah Madsen’s “Out of the Melting Pot into the Nationalist Fires: Native American Literary Studies in Europe.” American Indian Quarterly. 35.3 (2011): 353–371.
Noemi Lopinto. “Der Indianer: Why Do 40,000 Germans Spend Their Weekends Dressed as Native Americans?” Utne Reader. June 2009. http://www.utne.com/Spirituality/Germans-weekends-Native-Americans-Indian-Culture.aspx. Accessed February 21, 2011.
Christina Welch. “Complicating Spiritual Appropriation: North American Indian Agency in Western Alternative Spiritual Practice.” Journal of Alternative Spirituality and New Age Studies. 3 (2007): 97–117. 98.
Lisa Aldred. “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality.” American Indian Quarterly. 24.3 (2000): 329–352, 346.
Ward Churchill. From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism 1985–1995. Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1996. 378.
Michael Castro. Interpreting the Indian: Twentieth-Century Poets and the Native American. Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991
Stephanie McKenzie. Before the Country: Native Renaissance, Canadian Mythology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007.
Jodi A. Byrd’s The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011)
Rob Schmidt. “Germans = ‘Only Real Indians’?” February 14, 2009. http://newspaperrock.bluecorncomics.com/2009/02/germans-only-real-indians.html. Accessed February 02, 2011.
James O. Young. Cultural Appropriation and the Arts. New York and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010;
James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, eds. The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation. New York and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
Alexander Stephan. The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Diplomacy, and Anti—Americanism after 1945. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2006.
John Toland. Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. Norwell, MA: Anchor, 1976
Linda Williams. “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation, and Interracial Lust.” In Williams ed. Porn Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. 271–308.
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© 2013 James Mackay and David Stirrup
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Stirrup, D. (2013). Introduction. In: Mackay, J., Stirrup, D. (eds) Tribal Fantasies. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318817_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318817_1
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