Indian scalps on display at the Karl May Museum in Germany

Lost in Translation: Germany’s Fascination With the American Old West
By MELISSA EDDYAUG. 17, 2014

RADEBEUL, Germany — Hans Grunert is no stranger to requests from Native Americans regarding the display of sacred items among the headdresses, moccasins, jewelry and hundreds of other artifacts at the Karl May Museum, housed in a faux-log cabin behind a stately 19th-century villa in this eastern German town.

Since the museum’s opening in 1928, a Blackfoot medicine man has held a smoke ceremony for the peace pipe collection, and Lakota have made recommendations on how to display the contents of medicine bags in a way that appeases the spirits.

... But he never thought anyone would take offense at the collection of mostly Native American scalps, including one said to have been acquired by a German member of the Barnum & Bailey Circus for $100 and three bottles of liquor. That is, until the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians sent a letter in March demanding that their ancestors’ remains be returned for burial.

“Up to now, scalps have always been considered war trophies,” Mr. Grunert said.

The tussles over ownership of the scalps have come to reflect a broader cultural clash between the changing mores surrounding the care and repatriation of human remains in the United States and the fascination of many Germans with the mythology of the American West, celebrated to this day in countless summer festivals and literature.

In the guidelines drawn up last year by the German Museums Association recommending how to care for human remains, a reference to scalps from “the indigenous people of America” who “fashioned trophies from the heads of their killed enemies” is listed under exceptions to human remains acquired in a context of injustice. “Killing one’s enemy and making use of his physical remains were socially accepted acts in those cultures,” the recommendations say.


http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/18/world/europe/germanys-fascination-with-american-old-west-native-american-scalps-human-remains.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpSumSmallMediaHigh&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Disgusting.

It is not as though these are archaeological relics from ancient times, with no modern relatives.