"My Indian name," Michaelis told me, "is Lonely Man."
Michaelis acknowledged what has clearly evolved into a mix of American Indian and German identities. "I'm 75 percent Indian but still German," he said. He explained that while he loves his teepee, he has lately taken up an offer to sleep in Karl May's house because the traffic between Dresden and Meissen has been keeping him awake at night. Then he waved one hand. "The Indians made these out of the cotton that perfidious Americans sold them," he said, meaning his teepee. "This one's better. It's acrylic. From Saxony."
Lunchtime was approaching, and he recommended a saloon around the corner that sold buffalo burgers. He said he goes there when he can afford to. Tonight he'll be cooking on the fire.
"Schnitzel," he said.
3 comments:
Writerfella here --
Are you sure he didn't say, "Schmidtzel?"
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
I am so tired of some of these overbearing Germans who think they have all the answers as to what it means to be native. They all think the only Indian Tribal Nation in the US is the Lakota - I feel sorry for the Lakota having to put up with these crackpots who have their little weekend get togethers playing Indian - who call themselves hobbyist - I'd like to see how much they would want to be Indian if they had to live the reality of it. It's all a game to them - they should study their own culture and history and leave ours alone!
There are NO German Indians!!!!
Writerfella here --
W-E-E-L-L-L-L-L, once upon a time, there was one, a lone German-Irish child with fair skin and freckles and red hair who was a survivor of a wagon train attack in what is now Texas made by the Comanches. Among the child survivors, the Comanches only kept the female children alive. The male child survivors were given to various Comanche warriors to be ridden out on the Plains, then taken and swung by their heels against a rock or a tree and thus put to death. That one particular five-year-old male child survivor was handed to a Comanche man, who then rode with him out away from the attack site to meet his fate. When they stopped and dismounted for the execution, the child sensed what was about to happen. And he fought and kicked and scratched and hit and bit and screamed, and otherwise assaulted the Comanche man, who was so surprised and appalled and in pain that he finally had to stop what he intended. Somehow, he was able to convince the child that he no longer was going to kill him because the child had too much spirit. They returned to the raiding party and the story of what happened was told. The other Comanches agreed and they returned to the tribe with their captives and captured goods. The man then kept the boy and truly intended to raise the child as his own son. BUT--
The Kiowa and the Comanche were tribes on the Plains who never had been able to defeat one another and so they founded a treaty of agreement that they would meet every spring to share resources and to compete in games that replaced war and then to trade back and forth to uphold the treaty. The following spring, at their treaty meeting, the Kiowas saw the white child and asked, 'Who is that child?' And the story then was told of the Comanche brave's ordeal. The Kiowas were unanimous in their decision that they must have that child.
When the trading session began, the Kiowas asked for that child to be included. The Comanche man refused but quickly was told that the treaty would be broken if the child was not offered for trade. Thus, the Kiowas traded for and bought the child for four motheaten horse blankets, a saddle with no stirrups, a third of a bottle of whiskey, a rifle without a firing pin, and three swayback horses.
The boy was adopted into a Kiowa clan and, over time, was raised as a Kiowa. As he grew older, he began to accept his new existence and then to pursue it avidly. His name became Kood-Aw-Khoy, which means 'wrinkle-neck,' because when a white man turns his head, his neck skin wrinkles. When the boy was 15, the Kiowa were captured by the US Army and taken to Ft. Sill in what is now Oklahoma. Their captives were given the chance to be repatriated among the whites and Mexicans from which they came. But when it was Kood-Aw-Khoy's turn, he made it known through in baby-talk German through a German-speaking soldier that the Kiowa people were his people and that he was not a white man. No matter how long they chivvied him, he said he was Kiowa. Finally, he was given back to the Kiowas and that was the end of the matter.
The Kiowas broke reservation later and fled to Palo Duro Canyon in what is now Texas. Kood-Aw-Khoy became a member of one of the delaying groups that fought the soldiers to allow the rest of the tribe to escape capture. Finally, the tribe once again was re-captured, settled into what is now southwestern Oklahoma on the Wichita, Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache reservation. When Kood-Aw-Khoy was 24 and married into the tribe, the reservation was broken up by the Dawes Act, with Kood-Aw-Khoy receiving 180 acres of that land as his own allotment. He died of pneumonia at age 34 and is buried at Rainy Mountain Church near Mountain View, OK.
He became writerfella's great-great-great-grandfather, and 1/16th of his blood comes down to writerfella. His land allotment still is in the Paddlety family of the Kiowas and it now is the sixth oil lease from which writerfella and all his Paddlety relatives are benefitting. His story, as recorded in one of Alice Marriott's books on Plains Natives, was fictionalized in the NBC miniseries DREAMKEEPER in the segment called, "The Legend Of The Red-Headed Kiowa."
So, were there ever any GERMAN Indians? Yes, there was, and he was one of writerfella's most honored forebears...
All Best
Russ Bates
'writerfella'
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