Curatorial exhibition. Galerie Školská 28. Praha, 2015.
“If one were only an Indian, instantly alert, and on a racing horse, leaning against the wind, kept on quivering jerkily over the quivering ground, until one shed one’s spurs, for there needed no spurs, threw away the reins, for there needed no reins, and hardly saw that the land before one was smoothly shorn heath when horse’s neck and head would be already gone.“[1]
This exhibition examined the lives of a minor group of Czech dissidents – the subculture of the so-called Czech Indians – which sprung up at the very end of the socialist regime. It makes use of tribal and personal chronicles which did not record the camps and human stories that took place in any systematic way, as cameras were not usually found among the equipment of Czech Indian campers. Instead, these annals appear as random, sometimes achronological, sequences of images, documents and notes written by various authors. There are also a few amateur video documentaries which survive from the early 90s.
The North American Indian manner of camping in the Czech region finds itself somewhere at the intersection of so-called living history and experimental archeology. But living history, a kind of practice that attempts to revive a particular historical period, here brought out of the camps into the daily urban lives of the participants, was transformed into a specific lifestyle as part of a nonintellectual underground movement. Here, such traditional North American Indian elements as the respect for human individuality and nature, the community way of life, and the aura of self-produced objects for daily use come together with a kind of Indian hobbyism as a means of escape from the surrounding society under ‘normalizace’.
The exhibited photos were taken in theeighties, the period in which the greatest number of Czech and Moravian Indian tribes arose, and form a rich mixture of differentphotographic styles. These include snapshots captured randomly in the camps, images rather typicalfor family albums, and posed photographs that aimed to document the reality of Czech camping in the Indianstyle. These images were inspired bythe rare sources available at that time, such as the literature about the North American Indians, often spread assamizdat publications, and artifacts from ethnographic museums.
Some signs of the practice of camping in the North American Indian manner began to appear in the Czech lands already before the First World War. There are reports that one of the first Indian tepees stood at Brdy already in 1911, and the nicknames in use by tramps as well as the names of their cabins were often Indian in character. Also boyscouts camped in the North American Indian style.
The romantic image of the free North American Indian, a specific European notion of the ‘noble savage’ uncorrupted by civilization resurfaces during critical periods, corresponding to the oppressed Czech national identity under different regimes, whether in the period before the establishment of the independent republic (e.g. M. and J. Aleš[2], J.V. Sládek[3], F. Kafka[4]) or after the year1968 (e.g., J. Brabec[5], J. Topol[6]).
The phenomenon of camping in the North American Indian style extended also to the former GDR, Hungary, Poland and Russia (undoubtedly influenced by the adventure novels of Karl May, which were accepted by the socialist regime, and especially by their popular film adaptations from the 60s). Members of the Indian subculture were constantly monitored by the state police in the GDR, and although they were not under permanent supervision, the camps were randomly checked and minor clashes over styles of clothing were quite common in Czechoslovakia.
The first group meetings of Indian campers began to be organized in the 70s in the northern Czechoslovakia (in the region known for producing the glass beads used by North American Indians in their decorative work). „Beads were collected from dumps around Jablonec nad Nisou, and for deer leather (understood to be tanned leather), we waited in queues in the drug stores. Canvas for tepees was purchased wherever possible, and books and the other materials were a real treasure.”[7] In the 80s, a few Czech and Moravian Indian tribes arose (in 1991, the membership list of Westerners International numbered 10 tribes, and together with the other members of the ICWI[8] there were roughly 130 people), among which was the legendary Prague White Wampum tribe, known for its orthodox style of camping and uncompromising use of authentic materials and techniques. The tradition of meeting in the North was followed in 1986 by establishing traditional meetings in western Czechoslovakia, near Karlovy Vary. The period shortly before the collapse of the socialist regime became the period of the largest expansion of the Indian subculture in Bohemia. After the end of the regime, it became possible to travel abroad to visit North American Indians, some of whom also travelled to the Czech Republic, and to establish contacts with other “Euroindian” groups. But at this time, the whole Czech Indian subculture split. Some of the core groups shed their anti-regime and anti-consumer orientation, instead focusing more on material issues, such as trading in goods for hobbyists.
[1] Franz Kafka (1913). The wish to be a red Indian.
[2] Ondřej Chrobák. (12. 12. 2013–2. 2. 2014) Trapper & Boa – Osudová dobrodružství Jana a Mikoláše Alše. AJG: Wortnerův dům, České Budějovice.
[3] Josef Václav Sládek (1875). Na hrobech indiánských.
[4] Franz Kafka (1913). The wish to be a red Indian.
[5] Domácí kapela (1988). Indiáni milujou hory.
[6] Jáchym Topol (1997). Trnová dívka. Praha:Torst.
[7] Čikala (?). Zpráva o českých indiánech. Dotek, str. 20–22.
[8] Indian Corral Westerners International
