In one of its more equivocal forms, the experience of homesickness is rooted in an intuition that there is not and never has been a home. This occurred to me on an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, shortly after arriving in the town of Regensburg, deep in the heart of Bavaria. Outside the train station, I found a cab and asked the driver if he knew of the Regensburg Cowboy Club. He gave me the once-over. “Cowboy Club?” he queried. (I was lacking the requisite Western attire.) “Yes,” I said. “The Regensburg Cowboy Club.” He shrugged. “No problem,” he said.
I was in Regensburg on the advice of Murray Small Legs, my Blackfoot guide to Germany’s famously flourishing Indian hobbyist movement. As I was soon to discover, the presence of a Canadian at the Cowboy Club was a special occasion. My trip was a reversal of a pilgrimage that, for most hobbyists, is a right of passage: Instead of coming to North America to see real Native Americans, I was journeying to Germany to see pretend Indians.
Murray Small Legs, incidentally, is not a hobbyist; he is a real Blackfoot, from the Peigan reserve, in Alberta. He has been living in a suburb of Berlin since 1997, part of a growing aboriginal expatriate community in a country where an estimated 60,000 Germans convert, on weekends and holidays, into Nineteenth-Century Native Americans. For those who haven’t witnessed its curious pageantry, Indian hobbyism describes the imitation and study of Native-American culture by non–Native Americans. Typically, the hobbyist gatherings in Germany are organized around a central event, such as a powwow, a sweat lodge, or a rodeo. It was just such a gathering that I hoped to witness in Regensburg. The Regensburg Club, Murray Small Legs had told me, was hosting a weekend rodeo, and the local cowboys were expecting large contingents of dress-up Indians.
Located on the outskirts of town and forming a narrow border between a housing development and the farmland beyond, the Regensburg Cowboy Club is surrounded by a tall, Western-style wooden fence. The club occupies two or three acres of grassy land and is divided by a long, rectangular log cabin. On one side of this cabin is the Club’s camping ground, which, on this day, was dotted with brightly painted teepees. The other side was occupied by what looked to be a miniature Nineteenth-Century American frontier town. The fence, I realized, was designed not only to keep strangers out, but to mark a symbolic division of present-day Germany from the wild, unbridled West. Murray Small Legs had told me to ask at the gate for the “Chief.” The cowboy at the gate was shirtless, wearing a black ten-gallon hat, a leather vest, a pair of seriously new gwg jeans, cowboy boots, and a sheriff’s badge. “The Chief,” I said.
As I waited, I caught my first glimpse of Nineteenth-Century American life through the gate. A middle-aged German woman, wearing a horn-trimmed fur hat and a buckskin jumpsuit, chased after three young kids in fringed leather pants. I was fixed on a group of boys just behind them — who were dressed in leather loincloths, with American and Confederate flags on their heads — when the Chief approached. His outfit was similar to the gatekeeper’s, except it included a shirt, a handsome number of the classic, pearl-buttoned, Western variety. He extended his hand. Here it was, my first physical contact with Germany’s hobbyist movement, and it felt good.
My first real clue to the scale of the Indian hobbyist movement in Germany came during a meeting with Murray Small Legs in a Berlin coffee shop. “I would say that within one hundred metres of where we’re sitting there’s a hobby Indian,” he said. This statement seemed outlandish until I began to look further into the subject. At large festivals, such as the annual East German gathering known simply as “the week,” (where it is not uncommon to find thousands of white Indians,) the reality of Indianthusiasmus flashes briefly into sight. Hearing of mega-powwows such as these made me think Murray Small Legs might be right. Perhaps our waitress, with her tightly pressed uniform, had just dropped off her buckskins and feathers at
the cleaners.
The Chief, also known as the president of the Regensburg Cowboy Club, also known as Jim, led me up a hillside to the Club’s architectural and spiritual hub, a replica Nineteenth-Century frontier town, complete with a saloon, a sheriff’s office, and a plethora of lawmen. Wolf Canyon Town, which covered about an acre of dusty ground, appeared to be trapped in a psychic skirmish, struggling to decide whether it was a low-budget Western set or a German beer garden. In many ways, the scene outside the saloon was thoroughly Bavarian — picnic tables, beer steins, ashtrays, and clouds of cigarette smoke. Beneath these clouds, however, a rapid retreat from present-day Germany was taking place. The benches were occupied by Germans, some of them from Bavaria, but they had gone to great lengths to conceal this circumstance, donning elaborate “red Indian” and cowboy disguises. Beads, feathers, bone breastplates, and buckskin trousers abounded.
A quick glance around Wolf Canyon revealed that Germans who dream of the West generally dream of being Indians. Vastly outnumbered by their feathered friends, twenty or so cowboys, all wearing sheriffs’ badges, circled lazily around the central picnic area of town, which was evenly divided between the Düsseldorf and the “Free-Bavaria Indians,” who numbered perhaps 300 in total.
The Chief, who proved to be a charming host, led me to a crowded picnic bench and introduced me to Heinz Andringa, a senior member of the Düsseldorf club. Andringa, a house painter from Düsseldorf in his mid-fifties, told me his interest in Indian culture began when he saw Indians on TV as a child — galloping across the screen, the incarnation of freedom and bravery. With a deeply tanned complexion that had long passed into the danger zone, Andringa bore an eerie resemblance to the adventure-novel image of the “red Indian.” He explained, in English that was broken but decipherable, that the German fascination with Indians typically “builds in childhood and is a little bit fixed in the head.” Like most of his Düsseldorf brothers, Heinz wore very little — a buckskin loincloth, a beaded sheath, and, jutting from this, an immensely intimidating knife. He solicited my expert, Canadian, opinion about his Indianness, then threw his arm around my shoulder and looked deeply into my eyes. “I have a feeling in my heart,” he said, “just like an Indian.”
This was not my first acquaintance with the notion of an “Indian feeling.” Several days before my departure for Regensburg, Murray Small Legs had suggested to me that the German interest in all things Native American is connected to a form of cultural, perhaps cultivated, schizophrenia. Some Germans, he said, “have an ‘Indian’ feeling, they believe that on the outside they are German, but on the inside they are Indian.”
At around three in the afternoon, the flow of cowboys and Indians into Wolf Canyon began to dwindle, and Jim wandered over to my picnic table. The rodeo, he said, was about to begin. He chose this moment, moreover, to tell me what I had long suspected: Jim was only his Club name. His real name was Helmut Ring. “Jim,” of course, was much more appropriate. Yelling “Go Helmut Go!” as the Chief displayed his lassoing and knife-throwing expertise and, later, as he belted out the classics of Johnny Cash and Hank Williams in karaoke, would have murdered Jim’s moment.
It soon became evident that Wolf Canyon was not a world-class rodeo town. Bereft of beasts, the event lacked the drama of its North-American models, but the German frontiersmen didn’t seem to mind. The two main events — a lasso and a whip contest — involved elaborate simulations of animal contact. At the lassoing station, a three-poled wooden contraption took the place of bulls and horses; even so, only one or two people were able to complete the manoeuvre. The whipping competition also involved a three-pronged apparatus whose wooden arms were designed — through a stroke of baroque architectural genius — to support a series of straw targets. This event was won by a young fellow who obviously spent most of his free time snapping the tips off plastic straws.
Midway through the rodeo, I was approached by a man in a modest buckskin loincloth, who introduced himself as Klaus. He revealed that some familiar frontier tensions had made their way into Wolf Canyon. Klaus had the strenuously purposeful look of one who was seeing life through a few too many beer bottles. He leaned in close, pointing to one of the cowboys. “These people here,” he said, “it’s not the same. The cowboys, they are just, like, ‘We are cowboys. We are the best.’ But we here, we, it’s just for fun.”
Klaus found an outspoken ally in one of his tribesmen, who had overheard his remark. The man raised his glass, “Fun,” he yelled. “Fun, fun, fun!” The notion of fun was an odd place to stake the difference between cowboy and Indian imitation. As Heinz’s Indian feeling suggested, Indianists who flock to imaginary towns such as Wolf Canyon may be having fun, but they are not just having fun. Indeed, the most striking difference between the cowboy and the Indian idea of fun lies in the relative detachment of the cowboys. The cowboys were after the prizes — the plastic trophies and the kitschy belt buckles. The idea of being real cowboys didn’t seem to be part of their experience. The Indians, on the other hand, were more concerned about their Indianness than they were about the outcome of the rodeo. They were after something far more elusive: authenticity.
The German impulse to play Indian erupted in the late years of the Nineteenth Century, in the wake of a travelling rodeo-and-circus craze that presented Native Americans both as noble savages and as murderous enemies of civilization. The most famous of these productions was Buffalo Bill’s wildly successful Wild West Show. A consummate and cantankerous showman, William Cody first transported the Wild West to Europe in 1887, billing his spectacle as “The Drama of Civilization.” The principal players in this drama were Buffalo Bill and the diminutive sharpshooter Little Annie Oakley, but there was also a cast of Native Americans, primarily Oglala Lakotas from South Dakota, some of them looking for an escape from the poverty and cultural devastation of reservations. Orchestrating a spectacular suppression of savagery, Bill and Annie emerged not only as showstoppers but as heroes of enlightenment. True to the adventure of “Civilization,” Cody’s domesticated West blossomed from the barrel of a gun. “The bullet,” his program announced, “is a kind of pioneer of civilization. Although its mission is often deadly, it is useful and necessary.”
