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.
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.”
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