Oldal 137 [137]
OCR
(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 background 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 westerns, 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, filmstrips, 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 (belonging 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 native 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 135
