Enthusiasm

Two times during my school career did I manage to get a 1+ grade. The second one was for a maths exam on Analysis. I bagged it in one of the final classes of the Gymnasium and thus it was a regular grade, representing, according to the German grading system, the top score of 15 points. Nice work, sure – but actually nothing worth mentioning.

My first 1+, by contrary, carried the flavour of the exceptional – I’m tempted to even speak of a magic moment (of which the average school routine doesn’t provide too many …). I attained this first 1+ in an English exam when I was in the 7th class. Our subject during the weeks before had been the United States, a rather cursory 101 of its history and present (after all this was the English, not the history lessons).

One task in the exam was to name some groups of Native Americans – »Indianerstämme« was the common and totally innocent German term back then.

The task was rather a token question, nothing meant to make a real impact on the overall assessment, and our teacher, Mr Wegner, gladly contented himself with lists of five or seven tribes. – But, lo and behold, here’s that good, if a bit reticent pupil (yours truly) who’s come from the GDR two years ago and who slaps down a list of about one hundred names of tribes or ethnic groups of North American Natives. Makah, Tsimshian, Ponca, Mandan and Hidatsa, Mi’kmaq, Wampanoag, Ojibwe, Caddo, Catawba, Choctaw, Hopi, Ute … and fourscore more that certainly no-one in town has ever heard about. Whoa.

I can only surmise that for a teacher it is a blissful moment to witness such an outburst of genuine enthusiasm by a pupil for the subject at hand, especially when it’s not the latest hot topic (and I assure you that American Indians were not).

Anyhow, my teacher decided to appreciate my feat by adding the + to my grade. It didn’t mean anything tangible, for in the lower classes, the best grade is 1 (and then you go down stepwise: 1-, 2+, 2, 2- and so forth). The + was simply Mr Wegner’s way of giving me a tap on the shoulder. I got the message and felt honoured and intensely happy. I was a shy boy back then, still struggling to get to grips with the social workings in the new home country and only just about getting my feet onto firm ground again. So, a gesture like this 1+ meant a lot to me, and you’ll now be able to see why the word »magic« flashed through my mind a minute ago.

But hey, I didn’t intend to write a soap opera! Rather, I was getting at two questions: what made me jot down that endless list of strange names – and: why the heck did I even know them?

As I already mentioned in my article »Copykid«, I never was a sycophant or a teacher’s pet, quite the contrary: I disdained the collecting of cheap points by showy displays of mere diligence and always got mediocre grades for what was called Mündliche Mitarbeit (roughly meaning active contributing during classes).

No, listing those one hundred tribes was nothing but an expression of what I’ve already referred to above: genuine enthusiasm. My interest, back then, in the histories and cultures of the American Natives was bordering obsession. In the GDR where I’d spent my early childhood till age 11, this was not so very uncommon a thing. The Yugoslavian actor Gojko Mitić surely was an important factor. We boys were all ardent fans of Gojko – he was the incarnation, the symbolic representation of the Indianer. When we met to play together, you could hear us all shout: »Ich bin Gojko! Ich will heute Gojko sein!«

The other thing that was of great influence was the simple fact that I was born and raised in Dresden. And no, I’m not alluding to Karl May; I’m talking about Dresden as the last resting place of Edward Two-Two, Dresden as the home of many clubs of hobbyists concerning themselves with Native American culture, and Dresden as the place where you could find the Indianermuseum which I’ve already mentioned in my portrait of Karl Bodmer. The visits to the Indianermuseum with my parents and my sister shifted my interest in Native American peoples from the purely playful onto another level – I learned that there was much more than the prairie tribes and that war was not the heroic and sportsmanlike affair that we boys would enact when playing and that American Indians fought as allies of British or French armies and a lot more.

It was in a little booklet published by the Indianermuseum that I found an overview of the linguistic groups and subgroups and tribes of North-American Natives. I learned it by heart, just for fun – it was the source from which, years later, I would draw in a certain English exam …

Finally, there were the books of Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich. My friends and I were crazy for the adventures of the Lakota boy Harka who’d later adopt the name Inya-he-yukan and in a desperate time assume the leadership of his little Lakota band under yet another name: Tokei-ihto. Even the slackest readers among us rushed through all the six volumes that Welskopf-Henrich had published under the title »Die Söhne der Großen Bärin« (Sons of the Great Bear). I gleaned some Lakota words from those books, by the way, and scribbled them down into a notebook.

Later on, I also read Welskopf-Henrich’s second opus magnum, the pentalogy »Das Blut des Adlers« (Blood of the Eagle). It was yet another revelation to me, in that this narration is set in the 20th century and thus was very close to my own present. It only then occurred to me that Indianer were not a thing of the past, not beings exclusively populating history books and old tales. They were still there, in the real world. Dreadfully decimated and downtrodden, but walking about on the same earth that my own feet touched. I learned about the Native Americans’ political struggle for equal rights, about the American Indian Movement, about their trying to preserve or to revive the forebears’ cultural heritage but striving, at the same time, for an emancipated role in the present-day United States. And again I jotted down a bunch of Lakota words – among them the term »Heyoka« …

With the years, of course, my fervour gradually subsided. There were too many other things that I had to explore and to learn and to try and to strive for. But the natives of North America always kept their place in my mind and heart, and now and again the old passion springs to life and I can happily revel in a book on the modern art of the natives of the Northwest Coast or, on a train ride, lose myself browsing Wikipedia articles about the ethnic groups of the Southern parts of the United States or, most recently, immerse myself in the collection of Karl Bodmer’s magnificent watercolour paintings and the accompanying notes on the Missouri expedition of Maximilian zu Wied-Neuwied in the early 1830s. Or I do such a thing as becoming the sponsor for a painting by a Northwest Coast artist.

Against this background the feat that earned me my first 1+ at school, that long list of strange names, will surely no longer seem quite so mysterious.

And against this background, I’d like to add, it should be understandable that it makes me sad to witness political zealots ostracise people for using the word Indianer or the word Stamm (i.e. tribe) and taboo kids’ innocent playing Indianer or their dressing-up as Indianer for carnival.

First of all, I contend that the German word »Indianer« doesn’t carry a negative, a derogatory connotation and never did. And differently from the English »Indian« it’s not ambivalent or second-hand. Some of the zealots argue that »Indianer« is an exonym. But so what? The French »les Allemands« is an exonym too, and not a very accurate one at that. Who the heck cares?

I strongly doubt that the zealots’ motives are pure and innocent and that, when they’re assuming the role of some language police, they’re wasting any thought on the real Native Americans and their interests. I suspect other motives: trying to ban the word »Indianer« is a manifestation of presumed moral and intellectual superiority on their part and simply a trial of strength.

And the result? A better world, particularly a better world for American Natives? Unlikely, if you ask me. A more probable result is this: the whole subject – the history, the present, the culture of Indianer – has become mined territory for common people who’re not scientists. They won’t sit down and learn the (allegedly) proper terms and rules, nope: they simply avoid the whole subject, kids exclude it from their playing, and consequently Indianer vanish from our minds and become some abstract and remote phenomenon.

If I were a boy today: what would be the odds that I’d become an enthusiast for the American Natives – playfully first and then by becoming more and more seriously interested in the matter? And what would be the odds of me jotting down a list of a hundred tribes in an exam one day …?