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136 Ildikó Sz. Kristóf continent. Figure 13 is a drawing from the novel of Welskopf-Henrichs Tokeiihto visszatér (“The Return of Tokei-ihto’) (1973) and it represents a ritual speech inside a tipi: the specific clothes, tools, and ritual objects of the Dakota people as well as the wooden structure of the tent are all carefully shown. This also is a Sioux scene, but this time quite accurate, ethnographical, and “anthropological”, one could say." It is as if the viewer could observe from inside what would be happening in the tent. The drawing places the reader of the book in the role of a “participant observer”; she or he is supposed to share the anthropologist’s position in gathering knowledge about the tribe. Figure 14 however is a drawing from Sés szikläk völgye (‘The Land of Salt Rocks’), written originally by a Polish fake, or “wannabe Indian’, Sat-Okh, alias Stanistaw Suptatowicz, and translated into Hungarian in 1965. The drawings were made by a Hungarian graphic artist, Sandor Benké, and they depict the way of life—in Figure 14, the ritual of initiation for young boys—of an imagined, never-existing Canadian Indian tribe, the so-called “sevanez” (probably a coined version of the name Shawnee). Sometimes fake and sometimes closer to the real world, the ethnographic images in our children’s books have contributed to the dissemination, and at the same time the acceptance and toleration, of those other ways of living that Native Americans pursued. Although many scholars of the latter would not perhaps agree (see Deloria 1988; Mihesuah 1998), these images managed to bring those distant cultures that suffered so much under Euro-American colonial rule closer indeed to Hungarian/east-central European readers. They have succeeded in turning—not only popular but also scholarly—attention and compassion towards them. Several of my colleagues who were fans of Indian books in their childhood have chosen the profession of ethnography/anthropology, and some still work either for the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and/or one or another of our universities and museums.'? Knowing it from inside, I would argue that anthropology functioned not so much as a science of cultural exploitation (Deloria 1988; Biolsi 8&¢ Zimmerman 1997) in Hungary of the day but, rather, as a science of curiosity, sympathy, and solidarity for native people. And these positive emotions and motivations owed a lot to the images of our children’s books. Characters and Roles to Identify With: Warriors and Freedom What conclusion can one draw in this rather early stage of research? Multimediatized indidnosdi seems to have been a rather complex phenomenon of our socialist past. From a political point of view or, more exactly, from the point of view of the authorities it constituted a kind of “strain gauge” that was used deliberately by ‘4 WelskopfHenrich made several trips to the United States of America and Canada during the 1960s and 1970s in order to study the native culture of the Dakota Indians. 5 A number of them participated in this research, but not all of them agreed to cite their names in this study. This and some other considerations led me to not mention the names of the contributors at all.