In 1926, far from her home on the Pine Ridge Reservation in North Dakota, Sarah Ghost Bear died in a hospital in Essen, Germany. A fire had broken out at the Sarrasani Circus, where she was performing as part of a Lakota troupe brought to Europe to entertain crowds with a glimpse of “the exotic”. A local newspaper mourned her with a phrase soaked in colonial romanticism:
“She had hardly dreamed in her wigwam that she would find a resting place here, in the heart of the industrial district…”.
(Author unknown, Ein seltenes Begräbnis: Der letzte Weg der Indianerin, in: Essener Volkszeitung, 28 September 1926, p. 6, translated from German original.)
Sarah’s story sits at the crossroads of labour, spectacle, and survival. Like many Indigenous performers in Europe during the early 20th century, she was part of a long tradition of itinerant entertainment that stretched back to the great world’s fairs of the 19th century—Paris, London, Berlin—where so-called ethnographic displays staged non-Western people as objects of curiosity. Most prominent, see Hilke Thode-Arora as well as Eric Ames’ more recent study of the impresario and animal handler Carl Hagenbeck. By the 1920s, circuses like Sarrasani had adapted these imperial formats, transforming them into mobile shows complete with parades, mock villages, and curated encounters with the “exotic other”.
This form of itinerance—structured, spectacular, and racialised—offered work and travel under conditions shaped by power and exploitation. Circus posters, magazines, and souvenir postcards proudly advertised Chinese acrobats, Moroccan dancers, Indian fakirs, and Lakota Indians as main attractions. Yet even as they were commodified, these performers did not remain passive. During their 1926 tour, the Lakota challenged the circus’s exploitative conditions and resisted the roles scripted for them by the imperial gaze. As I explore their history, the story of Sarah Ghost Bear reminds us that itinerance has always been a site of struggle: between freedom and exploitation, between visibility and erasure.
Interwar German circuses like Sarrasani were not just local amusements—they were global enterprises, built on decades of cross-border mobility and experience. Founded in 1902 by Hans Stosch-Sarrasani, an outsider to traditional circus dynasties, Sarrasani grew into one of Germany’s most prominent travelling shows. Its success lay in staging the “exotic”, featuring so-called authentic American Indians, wild animals, and spectacular international acts. With tours stretching from Eastern Europe to South America, and a grand venue in Dresden seating 5,000, Sarrasani exemplified how itinerant performance could become both mass entertainment and cultural export. The circus remained in family hands through the interwar years, surviving political upheavals and economic crises—until its Dresden home was destroyed in the 1945 bombing (For a more thorough examination of this, see my book Worlds of the Ring).
Despite the Sarrasani Circus’s glossy publicity, its 1926 tour quickly revealed the darker side of itinerant spectacle. Lakota performers lodged repeated complaints about withheld pay, mistreatment, and the circus’s disregard for their contractual rights. Letters from William Ghost Dog and others describe harsh conditions, ignored medical pleas, and a system in which even funeral wishes were overruled. When his mother, Sarah Ghost Bear, fell ill and later died in a fire, the family’s request for her burial in Dresden—alongside Edward Two Two, a fellow Lakota performer who had died in Germany years earlier—was denied. Her resting place, like her labour, was dictated by the circus’s commercial priorities. A clause stating that bodies would be “disposed of in a humane manner” gave the company full control, even in death.
Other Lakota performers of the 1926 troupe, like James Grass and Henry Standing Bear, also spoke out. Grass warned Pine Ridge authorities not to send any more Lakota to Germany, decrying the circus’s use of an outdated 1914 contract to justify poor treatment. “No use to send no more Indian to Sarrasani,” he wrote, pleading for money to return home. Standing Bear, meanwhile, reported that performers were not allowed to leave even after their contracts expired. These voices reveal how deeply the performers depended on the circus while abroad—and how strongly they resisted being treated as disposable. Their letters and protests complicated the image of Hans Stosch-Sarrasani as a friend of Native Americans, exposing instead a sharp tension between public image and exploitative practice. In challenging their treatment, the Lakota asserted agency and dignity in a world that sought to script them as silent, exotic props.
Lakota performers were typically recruited through intermediaries linked to reservations like Pine Ridge, with contracts that changed little since before the First World War—outlining performance schedules, salaries, and sobriety clauses. Circus managers sought individuals who fit narrow, romanticised ideals of the “authentic” American Indian: long hair, broken English, horseback riding, ritual dances, and, for women, beadwork. When reality failed to match these fantasies, disappointment followed. Sarrasani’s press agent, for instance, dismissed the performers as “fat, phlegmatic gentlemen […] as harmless and unromantic as any American,” revealing both the persistence of colonial stereotypes and the circus’s role in shaping them (August Heinrich Kober, Ich wanderte mit dem Zirkus (Verlag der Frankfurter Bücher, 1958), p. 152).
The life of circus performers—constantly on the move and working outside formal institutions—stood in stark contrast to mainstream society and clashed with the values of Germany’s educated elite, who viewed mass entertainment as a threat to cultural tradition. As North American circuses like Barnum and Bailey introduced new spectacles and touring formats at the turn of the twentieth century, European circuses—including Sarrasani—were forced to modernise and professionalise. This commercialisation sparked anxieties in Germany, where national identity was closely tied to notions of high culture. In response, circus proprietors sought not only to enhance their appeal but to have their craft recognised as legitimate culture. Yet this evolution also deepened tensions between performers and directors. While artists responded to precarious conditions by founding the International Artists League (“Internationale Artisten-Loge”, or IAL) in 1901, proprietors—alarmed by what they saw as one-sided attacks—formed their own association, the “Direktorenverband”, in 1908. As former president Leo Bartuschek recalled, the IAL’s newspaper Das Programm had become a vocal critic of circus entrepreneurship, prompting directors to defend their businesses and reputations. That same year, they launched Das Organ, a multilingual periodical promoting legal clarity and professional dialogue. Despite their opposing interests, both sides emphasized the international scope of the industry and its desire for recognition—not as a political project, but as a modern cultural enterprise negotiating national and global pressures. The resulting tension between itinerant artistry and managerial authority reflected broader struggles over cultural legitimacy in an increasingly commercialized entertainment landscape.
In Britain, similar efforts emerged as circuses, performers, and proprietors sought legitimacy within a society that often marginalised them. By the late nineteenth century, British circuses had developed into an industrial trade, complete with agencies, trade unions, and specialised periodicals. Key among these was the Variety Artists Federation (VAF), founded in 1906 to advocate for performers’ rights, alongside its weekly publication The Performer. Unlike in Germany, where proprietors reacted to the formation of the performers’ union, British proprietors had already established their own organisation by 1899. Show people also mobilised politically through the United Kingdom Van Dwellers Association—later the Showman’s Guild of Great Britain—in response to government attempts to restrict mobility through the Moveable Dwellings Bill. In distancing themselves from other itinerant groups, British circus professionals, like their German counterparts, aimed to elevate their social and legal status. As C.H. Untahn noted, performers were long seen as “travelling people” without legal standing, vulnerable to exploitative contracts and public suspicion.
This pursuit of respectability was marked by a deliberate exclusion of Roma communities, who were cast as internal “others.” Despite shared experiences of mobility and marginalisation, Roma were formally and socially excluded from the show community. In both Germany and Britain, press agents and guilds publicly rejected any association with so-called “gypsies,” a term they saw as damaging to their status. At the same time, however, the exoticized imagery of “Gypsy” figures remained a staple in performance culture, used in acts like “Gypsy Castella” or “La Manola Gitana” to signal mystery and spectacle. Thus, Roma identity was appropriated for aesthetic and commercial value while Roma individuals were denied professional and social inclusion—illustrating how the circus could reproduce exclusion even as it celebrated a controlled form of diversity on stage. Yet not all performers remained silent or passive in the face of such structures. While Roma communities were excluded both socially and professionally, other marginalized groups—such as the Lakota—found ways to assert their agency from within the spectacle itself.
The history of Lakota performers in interwar Europe, and particularly their fraught relationship with the Sarrasani Circus, reveals how itinerance—far from being a romantic tale of travel—was entangled in hierarchies of race, labour, and cultural legitimacy. As circuses modernised and sought social respectability, they simultaneously commodified marginalised identities while excluding others, such as Roma communities, from belonging. Yet, within these exploitative structures, Lakota performers like William Ghost Dog and James Grass resisted being reduced to silent curiosities. Their letters and protests remind us that even when performers like the Lakota chose to travel and work abroad, they did not passively accept the terms of their commodification. Instead, they challenged the conditions imposed on them—asserting their voices, identities, and agency within a spectacle that sought to contain them.