A Weird Evening at the Powwow

During the first evening of last year’s powwow, the organizers honored a German man who arranges powwows in his country. I watched, speechless, and tried to determine what I was feeling. Was I angry? Amused?

Later, I decided that I was just disappointed.

It's unusual for Native Americans to award white people for playing Indian. The complaints of cultural appropriation made by Native Americans are easy for a Jew to understand. In the west, for centuries, Christians told us what the Bible "really" means and tried to prevent us from studying what our teachers say about it. As I’m offended when triumphalist Christians play “Children of Israel” (correct translation: Israelites) and call themselves Messianic “Jews,” so Native Americans are justifiably offended when white Americans “play Indian.”

Hopi elders laughed when they saw a dance by the all white Smoki “tribe” who claimed they were preserving an “extinct” culture. Decades later, I applauded when the town removed most of the Smoki Tribe signs hanging from light posts on the main street.

One of the few remaining "Smoki" signs on Gurley St.

Each year, I spend as much time as I can at the local powwow. Being there feels good to me. Something I can’t pinpoint reminds me of Israel, certainly nothing overt—it just feels more “real” than the culture I experience every day in the United States. (Also, the drumming and singing just slay me.) One year, when a young boy gave his prize money to an elderly woman, people were even more proud of him for that than they had been for his wonderful, traditional dancing.

After spending so much time at this powwow each year, I wanted to learn something about powwows and read a collection of essays called, simply, Powwow.

One surprising article discusses powwows in Germany. I found the writer's sympathy and support for them bewildering. Why do Germans get a pass while white American wannabes don't? The writers were touched by their deep respect for native traditions. And of course, Germans, unlike white Americans, are not their oppressors or the heirs and beneficiaries of the thefts of Native American lands and the genocides of Native American peoples.

But I believe that something more than respect inspires Germans. Escapism.

www.spiesen-elversberg.info

A few years ago, a young German man explained to me that Germans are ashamed of being German because they’ve been raised on guilt for the Shoah. Other Germans are horrified if one them flies the German flag. Many Germans join bagpipe societies, Rastafarians, or a number of other groups because they want to distance themselves from a past they feel guilty about but don’t understand.

A German theologian, Katherina von Kellenbach, made an effort to understand her country's history long history of anti-Judaism. She writes that German children are taught about the Holocaust in schools and see pictures of victims on televion, but have not learned about the perpetrators or the root causes of the Shoah. Speaking of the Holocaust is “taboo in most families” so most Germans have little information to use in gaining an understanding of why the Holocaust occurred.

After the war, the majority of Germans vocally opposed the trials of Nazi murderers. Von Kellenbach describes how Lutheran ministers and Catholic priest helped those who were convicted face their executions with dignity rather than remorse. (Before the war, those same churches had successfully stopped a program of euthanasia of the mentally handicapped, but had done nothing to stop the murder of Jews.)

Von Kellenbach discusses the two most typical responses of Germans after the war.

Both pathways are essentially escapist: the first group runs away by accepting false claims of innocence, while the second tries to break away by abandoning their parents. Both strategies are compulsive and rooted in the fear of guilt by association. The tortured memoir literature of children of perpetrators is testament to the futility of the flights from this legacy.

She argues that remembering and understanding the Shoah is necessary for “the renewal of moral integrity” and notes that “the pace and extent of reparative activity in Germany has accelerated over time.”

Nonetheless, most Germans today want to be anything other than German. When you meet someone who calls himself “European,” you can be sure he is German. There are blonde Rastafarians in Germany. German bagpipers wrote one of the songs considered for the Scottish national anthem. And there are German powwows.

Von Kellenbach relates, in another book, that she when she came to the United States, she was surprised to learn that there are still living Jews. Similarly, the essay in Powwow notes that Germans are surprised to learn that there are living American Indians. They say their purpose in holding powwows is to preserve that “extinct” culture. Anyone see the (dark) humor in that?

Despite my disappointmet, I wondered whether the tribe had any responsibility to question the motivations of the German man they had honored.

Today I found some support for my opinions and concerns in an online article published early last year by Indian Country Today Media Network. The writer calls German powwows a “desecration” of Native American culture. A Hopi living in Germany told him:

They are like a living museum and I find it very offensive, especially when they refuse to let true American Indians participate in their events. They say we’re too modern and believe we’ve lost our Native Americanness. They can’t seem to understand that our culture, just like theirs, has evolved from the 17th century to the 21st.

Comments by German readers support my suspicion that German powwows are both escapist and an appropriation of native culture. One German commented:

If you are German, you are raised to hate German history, as if all before 1945 was evil, so as German you HAVE no history, you HAVE no tradition, because it is all stained by our 12 years of Nazi history. If you grow up here, that dominates all our self image. So I understand very well why Germans want to be something else, anything else.   [italics mine]

The same German goes on to instruct Native Americans how they “should” respond to German powwows:

You guys would have much to teach the world with your view and your ways, if you chose to do… I find it a bit saddening, like you tell us White people just to leave you alone. Maybe that is what you wish. But I believe sharing culture is the future, not isolating it. And that is why today I am more European than German, because I believe in sharing the world rather than seperating oneself.   [italics mine]

Another German wrote,

My skin may be white but my heart beats native and in harmony with nature. And yes I know I'm a student and native culture is my teacher. But nobody is perfect. Further please be aware, a lot of german (better to say european) people donate money to support many native activities. [italics mine]

Some Germans have responded courageously to the knowledge of crimes committed by earlier generations; Von Kellenbach states on the first page of another book, that her uncle killed 30,000 Jews in Pinsk. (His trial was cancelled because of false claims that his health was failing.) Her family denied the charges and refused to address them, but eventually she felt obligated to face the fact of her uncle's guilt.

My lack of precise knowledge colluded with the perpetrators' desire to conceal their crimes. In order to interact with Jewish peers, I had to break the “conspiracy of silence” and become much more deliberate in my search for the truth.

It seems to me that German powwows are, at least in part, a tool for Germans to avoid the truth of their nation's complicity in the attempted genocide of my people.

The Yavapai and Apache have no obligation to remember murdered Jews or to help those few Germans who are trying to to restore the moral integrity of their nation, but I am disappointed that they are unaware that they are helping Germans forget.