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German interest in Canada’s Aboriginals
Germany’s deep-rooted interest in North American aboriginal history
by Mitchell Gray

An exhibit of North American aboriginal artifacts isn’t the first thing you’d expect to find at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. Yet the approximately 30,000 objects on display in a recent exhibition there are symbolic of a century-old German interest in aboriginal Canadian culture. Today, there continue to be numerous clubs, cultural events and museum exhibits in Germany that express a strong curiosity about and admiration for both Canadian and American aboriginal peoples.

The interest originated with European collectors, who gathered artifacts from aboriginal communities on the northwest coasts of Canada and the United States. Collecting began with the earliest explorers but grew rapidly when ethnographers appeared on the scene late in the nineteenth century. "There was a real sense at the time that native societies were dying out," says Megan Smetzer, a Ph.D. candidate in Northwest Coast art history at the University of British Columbia. The concern led to a "salvage paradigm" among ethnographers, who feared that the objects might soon disappear forever. They wanted to preserve "a clear picture of what they believed these cultures were like before Western influence," Smetzer says.

At the end of the nineteenth century, another German, author Karl May, was becoming one of Germany’s, and indeed the world’s, most popular fiction writers. He published dozens of books, but his adventurous tales of the American West, which he had never visited, captured the German imagination most vividly. His epic work Winnetou, about the relationship between a German pioneer in the United States (Old Shatterhand) and a powerful frontier Apache (Winnetou), embedded a romantic notion of North American aboriginals in German culture.

It’s this romanticism that inspires an important cultural debate today. Some Canadian aboriginals disapprove of the cultural displays exported to Germany or offered to German tourists in Canada, claiming that they encourage stereotypes. "The question seems to be whether the sharing of culture helps others to understand your culture, or if keeping it private preserves it and keeps it special," says Jennifer Kramer, the curator of Northwest Coast ethnology at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology. The re-enactment of aboriginal life for German audiences also draws criticism. "Some say it’s a sellout of culture — pure appropriation that should not be allowed," Kramer says, adding that others believe "that non-native people do appreciate the cultures they’re trying to enact, and that they’re trying to learn." The topic is hotly debated in British Columbia at the moment, due to increasing German tourism. "There’s a constant tension," says Kramer. "Is it economic development or exploitation?" The link between Canada’s aboriginals and interested German minds is not free of debate, but it undeniably represents a curiosity that has stretched across a century and is helping keep Canadian culture alive and vibrant overseas.

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