Modern American Indians in (and beyond) the Deutsche Reich: (Re)Claiming Indigenous lands, nations, and futures through transatlantic Indigenous travel

Abstract

ABSTRACT In 1850, Ojibwe writer and lecturer Gaagigegaabaw (George Copway) traveled through Europe en route to attend the Third World Peace Congress in Frankfurt, Germany, to represent the so-called Christian Indians of America. Gaagigegaabaw was but one of hundreds of nineteenth – and early twentieth-century Indigenous transatlantic travelers. Building upon recent scholarship in Indigenous modernism/modernity and transnational Indigenous studies, this essay engages the literal and literary movements of Indigenous travelers beyond the colonial powers of England, France, and Spain, as Indigenous North Americans continued their travels into German-speaking Europe. By returning to the nineteenth – and early twentieth-century writings of and about such transatlantic Indigenous travelers as Gaagigegaabaw, Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk), and Deskaheh (Levi General), this essay expands the ever-growing literary map of transatlantic Indigenous modernity as an era of extensive Indigenous mobility and of Indigenous modernism as a diverse range of adaptive aesthetics grounded in the continuation of land-based Indigenous nationhood.