When foreign cultures touch the heart.
Quiet like an "Indian"
I had just finished writing the story about an old millstone that has special meaning to my family. In search of a suitable picture, while browsing through the albums, I came across a photo that shows two children with feather headdresses. Suddenly I had to smile, because I remembered that time when two little "Indians" made the house unsafe.While my thoughts found their way onto the white sheet paper, my curiosity also grew as to the question of where I got “the knowledge” about the Indians ”as a child. Far away from us, from a foreign continent, impressions of the indigenous cultures flowed into two small children's hearts.
It was in 1966.
It was very quiet in the house. It seemed that the silence filled every nook and cranny of the rooms. It was so quiet that the ticking of the old living room clock could be heard. Their even beating mixed with the silence. Then she backed away, because two children's voices mixed in with the quietness and although they could only be heard very softly, the sound of the clock fall silent.The whispered words came from the kitchen. The table at which a large part of family life usually took place was gone. In its place was a construction made of woolen blankets. Clothespins held the structure together so that little light could penetrate.
That was our little kingdom!
My brother and I sat in the shelter of our blanket house. We often turned the kitchen into a little fantasy world. Sometimes it was a cave for us in which wild animals lived. Another time we played father, mother and child there. But that day we were two little "Indians" who lived in a tent with their children. We all, including my dolls Inge and Karl-Heinz, wore the special headdress with bird feathers. This feathers we had found in the garden some days before.
There we sat with our feather headdress, ate butterbiscuits and drank the juice from the carton, which looked like a pyramid. Now we were strong again and could ride our horses across the prairie. Schwuppdiwupp, I pushed my head through the gap between the blankets and explored the kitchen. Nobody was to be seen and we carefully crept out of our hiding place. I jumped on the corner bench, which was now a high mountain for us, and looked down. I stood there like a sailor looking down from the crows' nest of the ship's mast and got an overview of the vast country in our imagination. Through the kitchen window I saw my mother hanging up the laundry outside. The steam crept out of the clothes, rose and became one with the clouds of mist that surrounded them and nature. It had gotten cold, because the first night frost accompanied autumn. “The finger biter is here!” so my mother always said when she hung the laundry outside on the line in the cold. The icy air penetrated the fingertips first, and although they seemed numb, the sharp pain spread inside them. I saw another item of clothing find its way to the clothesline as I jumped off the bench.
The house was ours now!
We swung on our horses and with a loud "howl as an Indian" we rode from the kitchen through the hallway. With the stick of the hobby horse between our legs, we galloped through the house. Two little "Indians" rode loudly from the kitchen through the hall to the living room and back. Then I stopped abruptly because a new adventure was born."Brrr “, I called out loud and gently patted the head of my wooden horse. I looked through the living room window and saw that my mother had hung up the last of the clothes. We got off our wooden horses, hid them under the living room table, and crawled behind the sofa. Here we lurked and couldn't wait to scare my mother.Here we lurked and couldn't wait to scare my mother. The Time passed. We were so quiet that even the ticking of the clock could be heard again. But at some point we became restless. It all took way too long for us until my mother were coming and so we crawled out of our safe hiding place and cautiously crept through the living room.Lying on our stomachs, we crepted below the living room table.Then we crawled behind the armchair that stood under the window, in the direction of the hall. On the way there, I spotted my grandma, who came downstairs and disappeared into the kitchen. My brother and I crawled carefully behind the half-open living room door.In between I kept looking through the gap into the hallway. It was very difficult for us not to laugh out loud, so I pressed my hand tightly over my mouth. Suddenly my grandmother came out of the kitchen into the hallway and we jumped up. We imitated war cries and surrounded my grandma."Their little rascals!" She scolded, but we could tell from her face that she wasn't really angry with us. A couple of times we danced around her before we disappeared back into the kitchen. Back in our tent we started laughing out loud and were proud of our successful adventure.
Even when we were older and our adventure land was expanded, some of these days were shaped by our "Indian game". We walked in small groups of children through the little woods and across the meadows, but that's another story.
Now I had always assumed that we had our "Indian game" from the films on TV, but that couldn't be. At that time, the black and white pictures had not yet found their way into our living room. That was only many years later, when instead of the tube radio there was now the large, heavy television on the dark lacquered wooden cabinet.
So I grew up with a fixed image about the Native Americans, which was deepened by the Western romance and the resurrection of Winnetou. I wanted to know more about these peoples who have accompanied me since my childhood. Is the image that I created for myself correct? What do I really know about the people across the ocean who seem so foreign and yet familiar. So I set the anchor and set off on a journey through the virtual world of the Internet and hope to find answers to my.
