1. Sienkiewicz, Henryk, Portrait of America: Letters of Henry Sienkiewicz, ed. Morley, Charles (New York, 1959), 55, 59Google Scholar. Works in English analyzing Sienkiewicz’s travel to America include Budrewicz-Beratan, Aleksandra, “American Travel Books of Charles Dickens and Henryk Sienkiewicz,” in Moroz, Grzegorz, ed., Metamorphoses of Travel Writing: Across Theories, Genres, Centuries and Literary Traditions (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; Deszcz, Justyna, “On Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Native American Experience,” ATQ: 19th Century American Literature and Culture 16, no. 1 (March 2002): 43–54Google Scholar; Napierkowski, Thomas, “Sienkiewicz in America: 1876 and 1991,” Polish American Studies 49, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 45–55Google Scholar; Giergielewicz, Mieczysław, Henryk Sienkiewicz: A Biography (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Hoskins, Janina W., “The Image of America: In Accounts of Polish Travelers of the 18th and 19th Centuries,” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress 22, no. 3 (July 1965): 226–45Google Scholar. Following Deloria, Philip J. and Salisbury, Neal, eds., A Companion to American Indian History (Malden, Mass., 2008), 4–5Google Scholar, this article employs “an assortment of words to describe native people,” but prefers “American Indian” or “Native American” when referring to North American Indigenous people and “Aboriginal” when referring to Australian Indigenous people, as recommended by the Native American Journalists Association and the Associated Press. In most cases, however, this article discusses not indigenous people themselves, but rather the problematic appropriation of the idea of them by Polish writers. In this usage, this article employs the term “Indian” in a similar sense to Philip Joseph Deloria in Playing Indian (New Haven, 1999) and Vanita Seth in Europe’s Indians: Producing Racial Difference, 1500–1900 (Durham, 2010). On the history and ethics of naming and indigenous peoples, see Scott, James C., Tehranian, John, and Mathias, Jeremy, “Government Surnames and Legal Identities,” in Watner, Carl and McElroy, Wendy, eds., National Identification Systems: Essays in Opposition (Jefferson, NC, 2003)Google Scholar; and Bird, Michael Yellow, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly 23, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 1–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Sienkiewicz, Portrait of America, 63–64.

3. Letter to Stefania Leo, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Dzieła: Wydanie Zbiorowe, ed. Julian Krzyżanowski (Warsaw, 1948–1955) LV:429, quoted in Giergielewicz, 28. It is unclear whether the man refers to himself using the Euro-American term “Sioux,” or if this label is placed on him by Sienkiewicz.

4. Ureña Valerio, Lenny A., Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920 (Athens, OH, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Janusz Tazbir, Sarmaci i świat (Krakow, 2001), 286.

6. Ludwik Powidaj, “Polacy i Indianie,” in Stanisław Fita, Publicystyka okresu pozytywizmu 1860–1900: antologia (Warsaw, 2002), 30–36. Works addressing this aspect of Prussian discourse on Poland include Kristin Kopp, Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space (Ann Arbor, 2012) and Izabela Surynt, “Postcolonial Studies and the ‘Second World’: Twentieth-Century German Nationalist-Colonial Constructs,” Werkwinkel (Publication of the Department of Dutch and South African Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University) 3, no. 1 (2008): 27, at https://hdl.handle.net/10593/8025 (accessed August 9, 2022).

7. The focus of this article is not comparing Polish and Native American experiences of oppression, but rather the conundrums that drawing this analogy provoked in Polish writers. For a case study in the problematics of comparing suffering in the context of comparative genocide studies, see Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, 2009), and especially Israel Charny’s “Preface.”

8. Sienkiewicz, Portrait of America, 65.

9. On Poland and Ukraine, see Janusz Korek, ed., From Sovietology to Postcoloniality: Poland and Ukraine from a Postcolonial Perspective (Huddinge, Sweden, 2007) and Daniel Beauvois, Trójkąt ukraiński (Lublin, 2016).

10. Elżbieta Ostrowska, “Desiring the Other: The Ambivalent Polish Self in Novel and Film,” Slavic Review 70, no. 3 (Fall 2011): 503–23. See also Piotr Skurowski, “Dances with Westerns in Poland’s Borderlands,” European Journal of American Studies 13, no. 3 (December 2018).

11. See especially “Sachem” and “Lillian Morris” in Henryk Sienkiewicz, Lillian Morris and Other Stories, trans. Jeremiah Curtin (Boston, 1894). For comparison with Sienkiewicz’s views on Africa, see Barbara Zwolińska, “Listy z podróży do Ameryki” a ‘Listy z Afryki’ Henryka Sienkiewicza—dwa modele podróży i podróżnika,” Litteraria Copernicana 3, no. 31 (September 2019): 111–23 and Anna Klobucka, “Desert and Wilderness Revisited: Sienkiewicz’s Africa in the Polish National Imagination,” The Slavic and East European Journal 45, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 243–59.

12. Sienkiewicz, Portrait of America, 65. Sienkiewicz would have also been familiar with European American writing on American Indians by James Fenimore Cooper, such as The Last of the Mohicans (1826). See Marek Paryż, “The Last of the Black Snakes and the Last of the Mohicans,” European Journal of American Culture 31, no. 3 (October 2012): 219–30.

13. Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing American: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Lawrence, KS, 1982), 12.

14. Russell McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Ann Arbor, 2011). Also see Dirk Moses, ed., Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, 2012).

15. Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca, 2003). Harsha Ram’s analysis of the “elegiac mode” of writing on empire in imperial Russia is an interesting point of comparison. See The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison, 2003).

16. Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 388.

17. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York, 2010). The second edition includes a useful discussion of comparative contexts, as does Philip J. Deloria, “What Is the Middle Ground, Anyway?” The William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 2006): 15–22.

18. David M. Wrobel, Global West, American Frontier: Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depression (Albuquerque, 2013), 4–5. For an analogous study on East Asia, see Tomasz Ewertowski, Images of China in Polish and Serbian Travel Writings (1720–1949) (Leiden, 2020).

19. Likewise, Josef Conrad (born Józef Korzeniowski) famously described himself as “homo duplex” in a letter to Kazimierz Waliszewski.

20. Seth, Europe’s Indians, 11.

21. Ella Shohat, Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, 2006), 237–38; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Politics of the World-Economy: The States, the Movements and the Civilizations (Cambridge, Eng., 1984); and Milica Bakić-Hayden, “Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia,” Slavic Review 54, no. 4 (Winter 1995): 917–31. An entire subfield has arisen over the last two decades exploring applications of postcolonial theory to Poland and elsewhere in Eurasia. In Poland, Teksty Drugie has hosted multiple fora between 2003 and the present, including the 2014 Special Issue English Edition vol. 1 (5): Postcolonial or Postdependence Studies? See also Clare Cavanagh, “Postcolonial Poland,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 82–92; Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez, “Post-Colonial Poland—On an Unavoidable Misuse,” East European Politics and Societies 26, no. 4 (August 2012): 708–23; Krzysztof Stępnik and Dariusz Trześniowski, eds., Studia postkolonialne nad kulturą i cywilizacją polską (Lublin, 2010); and Ewa Mazierska, Lars Lyngsgaard Fjord Kristensen, and Eva Näripea, eds., Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours on-Screen (London, 2014). In the Russian empire, see: Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal, 2007); Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Cambridge, Eng., 2011); and numerous articles in Ab Imperio (see, for instance, Ilya Gerasimov, Sergey Glebov, and Marina Mogilner, “The Postimperial Meets the Postcolonial: Russian Historical Experience and the Postcolonial Moment,” Ab Imperio 14, no. 2 [January 2013]: 97–135). In the Baltics, see: Violeta Kelertas, Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam, 2006); Epp Annus, Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (New York, 2017); Epp Annus, “A Postcolonial View on Soviet Era Baltic Cultures” Journal of Baltic Studies 47, no. 1 (January 2016). In east/central Europe, see: Korek, From Sovietology to Postcoloniality and a forum in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, volume 48, issue 2 (May 2012), 113–16, reprinted in Dorota Kołodziejczyk and Cristina Şandru, eds., Postcolonial Perspectives on Postcommunism in Central and Eastern Europe (New York, 2016). In the Balkans, see: Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (New York, 1997).

22. On the application of civilizational discourse to and by eastern Europe, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Palo Alto, 1994) and Elżbieta Kwiecińska, “A Civilizing Relay: The Concept of the ‘Civilizing Mission’ as Cultural Transfer in East-Central Europe, 1815–1919” (Thesis, European University Institute, 2021).

23. Sunnie Rucker-Chang and Chelsi West Ohueri, “A Moment of Reckoning: Transcending Bias, Engaging Race and Racial Formations in Slavic and East European Studies,” Slavic Review, Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias 80, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 217. The article is part of a special issue of Slavic Review addressing race in the field of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

24. Marina Mogilner, “When Race Is a Language and Empire Is a Context,” Slavic Review, Critical Discussion Forum on Race and Bias 80, no. 2 (Summer 2021): 208.

25. Recent studies on race and empire in Poland include Ureña Valerio, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities and Maciej Górny, “A Racial Triangle: Physical Anthropology and Race Theories between Germans, Jews and Poles,” European Review of History 25, no. 3–4 (July 2018): 472–91.

26. Maria Janion, “Polska między Wschodem a Zachodem,” Teksty Drugie: Dociekania Filozoficzno-Literackie 84, no. 6 (2003): 131–49.

27. Paul Edmund de Strzelecki, Physical Description of New South Wales and van Diemen’s Land (London, 1845), 333.

28. Ibid., 342.

29. Ibid., 343.

30. Lech Paszkowski, Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki: Reflections on His Life (Kew, Australia, 1997).

31. Wacław Słabczyński, Paweł Edmund Strzelecki: Podróże, odkrycia, prace (Warsaw, 1957) and P. D. Gardner, Through Foreign Eyes: European Perceptions of the Kurnai Tribe of Gippsland (Churchill, 1988). See also Wacław Słabczyński’s collection of documents, Pisma wybrane (Warsaw, 1960).

32. McGregor, Imagined Destinies, 15; and Marguerita Stephens, White without Soap: Philanthropy, Caste and Exclusion in Colonial Victoria, 1835–1888: A Political Economy of Race (Melbourne, 2010), 125, adapted from Stephens’ 2003 PhD thesis at the University of Melbourne.

33. Opposing biographical interpretations are provided by Helen Heney, In a Dark Glass: The Story of Paul Edmond Strzelecki (Sydney, 1961); and Paszkowski, Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki.

34. For a revisitation and expansion of Edward Said’s foundational 1979 Orientalism, see Wael B. Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of Modern Knowledge (New York, 2018). The framework of Orientalism has been applied to eastern Europe by Wolff, Todorova, and a growing body of others (see footnote 21). Places named after Strzelecki include the Strzelecki Ranges, Mount Strzelecki, Strzelecki Desert, and Strzelecki State Forest; a list of place names can be found in Paszkowski, Appendix 3, 301.

35. Strzelecki, Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 3.

36. Ibid., 343–45.

37. Ibid., 346–47.

38. Ibid. 344.

39. Ibid. 349.

40. Ibid., 351–52.

41. Ibid., 354.

42. Stephens, White Without Soap, 107, 125. Also see Moses, Genocide and Settler Society.

43. Paszkowski, Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki.

44. For a comparison, see Strzelecki, Physical Description of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, 350–51; and Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle (New York, 1909), 472.

45. Christine Kinealy, “A Polish Count in County Mayo: Paul de Strzelecki and the Great Famine,” in Gerard Moran, ed., Mayo, History and Society: Interdisciplinary Essays on the History of an Irish County (Dublin, 2014), 415.

46. Paszkowski, Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki.

47. “Fourth Report for the Select Committee of the House of Lords Appointed to Inquire into the Operation of the Irish Poor Law,” Parliamentary Sessional Papers 32 (1849), 853–954. Excerpts of the testimony can be found in Paszkowski, Sir Paul Edmund de Strzelecki and Kinealy, “A Polish Count in County Mayo.”

48. Ibid.

49. Kopp, Germany’s Wild East.

50. Quoted in Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, 21; originally in Franz Wigard, ed., Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen der deutschen constituirenden Nationalversammlung zu Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt am Main, 1849).

51. Surynt, “Postcolonial Studies and the ‘Second World’,” 77, originally in William Rogers [pseud.], “Beobachtungen auf einer Geschäftsreise in das Großherzogthum Posen,” Grenzboten 3, no. 27 (1848): 39. The passage is also quoted and analyzed in Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, 21–22.

52. Ibid.

53. Quoted in Surynt, “Postcolonial Studies and the ‘Second World’,” 80; originally in ““Vier Jungens gehen zur See, vier Jungens werden Landwirt irgendwo im Osten: Die deutsche ‘Ostkolonisation’ als diskursives Ereignis,”in Literaturgeschichte 18–20. Jahrhundert, ed. Bernd Balzer and Wojciech Kunicki (Wrocław, 2006), 11–19. See also Kopp, Germany’s Wild East, 44; Ureña Valerio, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, 45; and Anna Kołos, “‘Wildness’ as a Metaphor for Self-Definition of the Colonised Subject in the Positivist Period in Poland,” Journal of Education Culture and Society 2, no. 1 (2011): 81–95.

54. Wacław Forajter, Kolonizator skolonizowany: przypadek Sygurda Wiśniowskiego (Katowice, 2014), 256; and Surynt, “Postcolonial Studies and the ‘Second World,’” 81.

55. Maciej Janowski, Polish Liberal Thought Before 1918 (Budapest, 2004), 87.

56. Kołos, “‘Wildness’ as a Metaphor,” 87.

57. Sygurd Wiśniowski, Tikera, or, Children of the Queen of Oceania, ed. Dennis McEldowney, trans. Jerzy Henryk Podstolski (Auckland, 1972), xxiv.

58. Ibid., xxvi.

59. Biographies can be found in Dennis McEldowny‘s editor’s note in the 1972 translation of Tikera and Wacław Forajter, “Mitologia Pogranicza: Australia i Stany Zjednoczone Sygurda Wiśniowskiego,” Postscriptum Polonistyczne 1, no. 17 (November 2016): 23–32. Both draw from Sygurd Wiśniowski, Koronacja króla Wysp Fidżi: oraz inne nowele, obrazki i szkice podróżnicze, eds. Julian Tuwim and Bolesław Olszewicz (Warsaw, 1953).

60. Sygurd Wiśniowski, “Listy z Czarnych Gór,” Kłosy 508 (March 3, 1875): 179.

61. “Indians in the Reports of Polish Travelers in the Second Half of the 19th Century,” in Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays (Lincoln, 1999), 297.

62. “Listy z Czarnych Gór,” Kłosy 514 (May 6, 1875), 280.

63. Forajter, Kolonizator Skolonizowany, 12, 17.

64. Ibid., 269.

65. Kirstine Moffat, “Five Imperial Adventures in the Waikato,” in “Writing the Waikato,” special issue, Journal of New Zealand Literature 29, no. 2 (2011): 37–38.

66. Wiśniowski, Tikera, 24.

67. Ibid., 58.

68. Moffat, “Five Imperial Adventures,” 57.

69. Wiśniowski, Tikera, 42.

70. Ibid., 133.

71. Ibid., 11.

72. Ibid., 15.

73. Ibid., 103.

74. Ibid., 262.

75. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture, and Race (New York, 1995), 19.

76. Ostrowska, “Desiring the Other.”

77. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), 292.

78. Wiśniowski, Tikera, 145.

79. Wacław Forajter, “Oślepiająca biel. Problem kolonialnego pożądania w „Dzieciach królowej Oceanii” Sygurda Wiśniowskiego,” Teksty Drugie, no. 3 (2013): 301–15.

80. Wiśniowski, Tikera, 143.

81. Ibid., 23.

82. Ibid., 289.

83. Ibid., 292

84. “Listy z Czarnych Gór,” Kłosy 514 (May 6, 1875), 280.

85. For analysis of the transatlantic circulation of the writing of François-René de Chateaubriand and James Fennimore Cooper, see Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London, 1996) and Gerald Gillespie, “In Search of the Noble Savage: Some Romantic Cases,” Neohelicon 29, no. 1 (September 2002): 89–95.

86. “Suowie i Amerykanie,” Wędrowiec 14, no. 358 (1876), 282; and Forajter, Kolonizator Skolonizowany, 257.

87. Sygurd Wiśniowski, “Langenor,” in Sygurd Wiśniowski, Ameryka, 100 Years Old: A Globetrotter’s View, trans. Marion Moore Coleman (Cheshire, 1972).

88. Stephens, White Without Soap, 12.

89. Rucker-Chang and Ohueri, “A Moment of Reckoning,” 220.

90. Budrewicz-Beratan, “American Travel Books,” 96. For the impressions of Sienkiewicz’s travel companion, Helena Modjeska, see Memories and Impressions of Helena Modjeska: An Autobiography (New York, 1910); and Giergielewicz, Henryk Sienkiewicz, 25–26.

91. Jane Lydon, Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy across the British Empire (Cambridge, Eng., 2020), 31.