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(Multi-)Mediatized Indians in Socialist Hungary: Winnetou, Tokei-ihto, and Other Popular Heroes
not only a peacefully racking group of horsemen in an imagined landscape, but it
provides clues for the reader/viewer to identify the mountains and cliffs in the back¬
ground by a careful execution of the visual representation, the design, the shape,
and the position of the cliffs. This is beyond doubt Monument Valley, lying on the
border of the states of Arizona and Utah and to be found on the Navajo reservation
in the United States of America, a typical scene for a great number of the “Wild
West” movies from at least the time of the chief actor of the early Hollywood west¬
erns, John Wayne (1907-1979). Just like Monument Valley represented, typified
the “Wild West”, or the “Land of the Indians” for Hungarian children, so the figure
of the prairie Indians, especially the Sioux with their spectacular headdress, tipis,
and nomadic bison hunting came to represent the Indian in the over-simplified,
over-stereotyped world of socialist multimediality of our childhood, novels, film¬
strips, movies, photo postcards, and so forth.
Taking a look behind the images, it is important to note however that the land
and the tribe did not/do not fit at all. No Sioux Indians (belonging to the Siouan
language group) have lived in Monument Valley (if not by force). Since at least the
sixteenth century, it has been the homeland of the Dine (or Navajo) Indians (be¬
longing to the Athapascan language group) (Pritzker 2000: 51-55, 103, 316-339).
Native American scholars have long expressed their criticism of those Hollywood
movies and the resulting images that confounded different characteristics of the na¬
tive tribes and conveyed a never-existing, constructed world of showcase lands and
Indians (Kilpatrick 1999; Mihesuah 2001; see also Sz. Kristöf 2007, 2008, 2012).
‘These scholars surely would criticize the illustrations of our socialist Indian books
for quite similar reasons. Contemporary Native Americans cannot identify with
those pictures since they cannot recognize themselves in the exoticized, idealized,
and/or homogenized, simplified images that the visual products of the dominant
Euro-American culture has conveyed about them since at least the late nineteenth
century (Fixico 1997, 2003; Mihesuah 2001; see also Sz. Kristéf 2004). Native
Americans, being more heterogeneous both linguistically and culturally than it was
suggested by those pictures, call the “natives” who appear in these images “celluloid
Indians” (Kilpatrick 1999). As we see, celluloid Indians arrived in eastern Europe,
too—they appear in socialist children’s books.
Ethnographic Representations
It is undeniable however that there was an equally powerful tendency in our book
illustrations to represent Native Americans with an ethnographic “accuracy”. At
least there were efforts to do so. Figures 12, 13 and 14 are good examples. Their
purpose is to introduce the viewer to the peculiar way of life of the indigenous
people of North America, down to its details. Figure 12 is a drawing from Cooper's
novel A préri (“The Prairie’), depicting a scene of bison hunting with its various
techniques, strategies, and tools. This is another Sioux scene, but this time placed
in the appropriate locality, somewhere in the northeast of the North American
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