The term “Indian” has come to represent not the Indigenous peoples of North America but the European construct of an entire people. My dissertation examines this construct with a view to answering the following question: to what extent is “the Indian” not simply a White or a European invention, but a German one?
In my dissertation I investigate the origins and trace the development of the image of North American Indigenous peoples in three works of German fictional prose from the period between the late eighteenth-century and the late nineteenth-century: Sophie von la Roche (1730-1807), Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1798); Charles Sealsfield (1793-1864), The Indian Chief or, Tokeah and the White Rose (1829) and Karl May (1842-1912) Winnetou I-III (1893). My analysis shows the role that representations of North American Aboriginals played and continue to play as stereotypes of the Other in the ongoing and complex processes of German identity-formation.
The three works belong to different moments in a historical period of rapid change, but their authors have made a significant contribution to the enduring image of the Aboriginal. All three authors mobilize an image of Indigenous populations that reveals tensions in the representations of the European and the Aboriginal characters. Chapter One discusses La Roche’s emphasis on the underdevelopment that she believed existed in Aboriginal society in the realms of education and culture. Chapter Two examines how Sealsfield championed Manifest Destiny by showing that the archaic political system of the Oconee, which he based on the Metternich regime, led to the tribe’s demise. Chapter Three considers May’s Winnetou as an elegiac reflection on the “dying man,” and the author’s motivation in creating a fantasy Blood Brotherhood of Germans and Apache.
All three authors seem to work with the distinction between the “good Indian” and the “bad Indian.” This dissertation argues that the distinction creates a simplistic dichotomy that fails to fully describe the roles of Aboriginal characters in the texts examined. I maintain that it is the words and actions of Aboriginal characters in the narratives, when read in a more nuanced way, show that they are more intricate literary creations than perhaps the authors intended.
The Epilogue challenges the reader to consider the future of this German image in a global context. Bear Witness’ short film The Story of Apinachie and her Redheaded Warrior is used as a case study. In his short film, Witness confronts the audience with a provocative juxtaposition of two stock images of Aboriginal peoples, one from a West German Karl May film and the other from the video game Virtual Fighter V. Witness shows that Aboriginal peoples are aware of the German image of Indigenous cultures and are now slowly beginning to reclaim these images as their own in the context of a postcolonial discourse.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/32864 |
| Date | 31 August 2012 |
| Creators | Perry, Nicole |
| Contributors | Goetschel, Willi |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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