American Indian Culture and Research Journal

A curious phenomenon in reservation tourism is the prominence of central European, especially German-speaking, visitors. Recently, representatives from four reservations have been promoting their lands as tourist destinations at the world’s largest travel trade exposition in Berlin. This is surely due to the interest held by many educated Europeans in ecological matters and in aspects of alternative spiritual experience. They commonly perceive the indigenous population of the Americas as more sensitive to and protective of the natural environment than are members of other racial and ethnic groups. Many seem also to think that Native Americans can help them to understand primordial relations between human beings and nature. The German idealization of aboriginal life in the woods can be traced back to prints by Albrecht Dfirer and Albrecht Altdorfer shortly after 1500. Another motive is simple human curiosity about the unfamiliar, but the national parks supply enough to satisfy the merely curious. For a century and a half, German-speakers have had available western novels in their own language, and as German was the ZinguuJi-ancu in much of central and eastern Europe, these works circulated well beyond one country’s borders. Late in the nineteenth century, western shows-most conspicuously Buffalo Bill’s-toured Europe, raising interest in the vanishing frontier and its inhabitants. One specific motive that drives central Europeans to visit reservations is their long acquaintance with the western novels of a prolific charlatan who never visited the American West.