(Un)Following in Winnetou’s Footsteps: Representations of North American Indigeneity in Central Europe

This book examines the ways in which North American Indigenous identity has been (re)imagined, represented, and negotiated in German, Croatian, Italian, Polish, and Czech culture. Employing a cross-disciplinary and comparative approach and drawing on a range of media—from literature, comics, and film to photography, painting, and the performative arts—across different historical and cultural backgrounds, it aims to both contribute innovative scholarship on Indigenous studies in Europe and open a new avenue in the field by focusing on Central European settings that have received little or no critical attention to date. 

The book’s novelty also comes from its focus on the latest developments in the field, including the “Ravensburger/Winnetou controversy,” which swept across Europe in 2022, echoing the 2017 Canadian debate over Indigenous appropriation and free speech. It seeks to provide a sound reference and lay the groundwork for future scholarship by opening up a conversation on how Indigenous identities have been portrayed in Central European literature and media texts. To this end, it not only addresses generalized expectations about North American Indigenous people underlying (Central) European public discourse and imagination but also questions whether and to what extent some of the ingrained stereotypical views and practices, such as hobbyism, have been challenged in the face of Indigenous resurgence, rapidly changing media and information-sharing realities, and global cultural shifts. The closing interview with Métis playwright, actor, and director Bruce Sinclair underscores one of the book’s key goals—to spark an informed cross-cultural dialogue that will reveal the mechanisms of, as well as the contradictions and tensions inherent in, the politics of Indigenous representation in (Central) European cultural industries and encourage (Central) Europeans to confront their own cultural assumptions and attitudes. 

Sanja Runtić is Professor of American literature at the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Osijek, Croatia. Her teaching and research interests are in the areas of American and Canadian studies, Native American literature (the topic of her Ph.D. dissertation and major publications), Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, postmodernism, and women’s studies. She is the co-author of Suvremena književnost američkih starosjedilaca [Contemporary Native American literature] (2013) and author of Vrijeme buđenja: (De)konstrukcija ženskog subjektiviteta u američkoj fikcionalnoj prozi na prijelazu iz 19. u 20. stoljeće [The awakening: The (de)construction of the female self in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American fiction] (2019). She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Arizona (2003– 2004), a Research Scholar at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies (2002) and Centro Studi Americani (2022), and Erasmus+ Fellow at the University of Central Oklahoma (2017) and Roosevelt Institute for American Studies (2023).

Jana Marešová, Ph.D., completed her Ph.D. at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic and worked as an assistant professor at the Department of English, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. She is a member of the Central European Association for Canadian Studies and of the Indigenous Literary Studies Association. Her main research interests are contemporary Canadian Indigenous fiction, oral storytelling, and Indigenous epistemologies and their reflections in Indigenous writing. In her publications and presentations, she explores contemporary Indigenous writing as a continuation of oral storytelling practices and the interconnections of Indigenous and Central European cultures. She has been awarded a Doctoral Research Fellowship by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta, Canada (2014–2015), the Eccles Centre European Postgraduate Fellow in North American Studies Award, Eccles Centre, British Library (2016), and the International Council for Canadian Studies Graduate Student Scholarship (2018). In 2023, she received the Best Doctoral Thesis in International Canadian Studies Award for international scholars by the International Council for Canadian Studies Awards and Grants Committee.

Klára Kolinská, Ph.D., teaches at the Department of English, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic, and at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures of Charles University, Prague. Her main areas of teaching and research include early and contemporary Canadian fiction, theatre, and drama, multiculturalism, and Indigenous literature and theatre. She has published mainly on Canadian Indigenous literature and theatre, Canadian prose fiction, contemporary drama and theatre, and theory and practice of narrative and storytelling.