Someone asked about that “German cosplayers” bit, as I hoped they would. Answering here so I can tag and link.

So the thing is, the 19th-20th century attempts by the settler-colonial power structure of America to forcibly assimilate its indigenous remnant population - residential schools, prohibitions on traditional languages and practices, etc. - were reasonably successful. To the point that when the ‘60s-‘70s American Indian Movement came along and a lot of them decided to reassert their distinctiveness by reviving the Old Ways, they often realized that no one around still had a comprehensive memory of how the Old Ways went.

But.

Over in the German lands, the 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by very influential Romantic movements that emphasized outdoor nature experience, traditional cultures, and preindustrial crafts.

Meanwhile, the works of American novelist James Fenimore Cooper had proven quite popular in German translation. Cooper specialized in romantic outdoors adventures featuring white men adopting Native American ways. (It doesn’t come up often these days, but a lot of early American settlers [escaped slaves too] ended up assimilating to native cultures.)

Then German author Karl May wrote even more popular novels in the 1800-1910s, Western-set adventures featuring the outdoorsman partnership of the German Old Shatterhand and the Apache Winnetou. These were huge in Germany, there’s a bit in Inglorious Basterds that references this.

Soo, add this outdoors preindustrial romanticism to this Native American pop culture fad and a lot of Germans were like “You know what’s a great idea? Going into the woods and pretending to be injuns.” So they started reenactment societies.

Now that’s a crapshoot. Civil War reenactors are pretty accurate, but they have copious contemporary records in their own language to go from. OTOH, Renaissance Faires have nothing to do with the Renaissance, and are mostly based on 1970s liberationist retellings of 19th-20th cen. nationalist retellings of earlier Christian retellings of earlier mythologizations of earlier history still.

But the thing was for one, you know Germans, always gotta do things the proper way, for two, Germany was in a *huge* anthropological boom at the time.

That’s the thing about Indiana Jones fighting Nazi archaeologists - by WWII, Germany was world leader in the field. Just like all the humanities, and social sciences, and physical sciences, and engineering, and… What they didn’t have was land and thus, especially before the Green Revolution and USN-backed freedom of the seas, food. In good times they could source from the exporting regions of the Americas, African coasts, and Baltic watersheds, but in bad times the Royal Navy was all “haha NOPE, enjoy your famine ;)”

So these reenactors ended up practicing some serious fidelity to the sources, and passed these practices down within their own subculture. With the result that come the 1970s, a lot of American tribes ended up sending members to Europe to learn their own traditional cultures from these German hobbyists.