"We have never had a distinct tribe. We were North American Indians on the upper Missouri around 1850. A distinct Indian tribe is a tremendously complex thing. For example, the Cheyenne, they are so popular: two Cheyenne went on an expedition and brought two Lakota women. And these prayed in their own way and embroidered in their own way. Two years later, five men went out and brought four Arapaho women. And they prayed in their own way and embroidered in their own way. And it got mixed up again. So, to say that this is a Lakota embroidery pattern, I do not think that is possible either. Their culture was mixing. And basically, the Indian culture did not come about until the 15th century when there were wild horses. The prairies are completely uninhabitable without horses."
"The plan there was that in two years the top boss would retire, then it would move up one rank, then that one would probably get pregnant, so it would move up again. It was just like you see in movie ‘How Poets Are Enjoying Their Lives’: ‘Then there are only positives to come,' and that scares me. I do not want that. So, when I got the paper, I tried to see if it was really necessary. They said it really was. So, I talked it over with my wife at home, the next day I returned the company bonus, which was a lot of money at the time - 12,000 - and asked for my employment to be terminated. I got a stamp and got out of the bank. My mom got me a job with a construction company. They told me right away. The chief economist was an acquaintance of my mother's and he said: 'Right, Mr. Kročák, fill this in here.' It was an application form for the Communist Party. I said I am not filling this in. He asked if I had already a stamp in my ID concerning the employment. I said I did. And he said: 'Then go get your discharge stamp.' So, they hired me in the morning and fired me in the afternoon."
"That was like a red rag when you were walking around in the tramp clothes. Then, when I was working, I had a beard as well. And when I walked down the Wenceslas Square, they checked me three times and twice asked me why I had the beard and hair and wrote down my ID. But it was about people. When the cops were ‘normal’ (a normal person did not go to the cops), if the cop was so-so, he wrote us down and asked where we were going. We said some made up nonsense, they wrote down that we were going to Kamenný Přívoz, we were going to sleep there and that was the end of it. But when it was some jerk who wanted to gain an insignia through us, he asked us what kind of patch is on our backpack. We said the U.S. - meaning Uhelné Sklady [name of a football club – trans.], he said no, that it is not Uhelné Sklady, pulled out a cutter and cut the patch off. Same with our home patch: ‘Did you register this organization? You did not?' He cut it out. So, it was like that too."
Ladislav Kročák was born on 26 April 1954 in Prague and lived with his family in Mnichovice until he reached adulthood. His father was a trained shoemaker and repaired shoes in Prague, his mother was a clerk. He spent his childhood in the 1950s and 1960s in very modest circumstances. He attended primary school in Mnichovice, with excellent grades. He was interested in nature and loved reading, especially adventure fiction. At the age of eight he found his role model of hero and authority in Winnetou. At the age of 13, his father let him go for the first time on a tramping trip with his peers, and from then on, he tramped regularly. In his first year at the secondary school of economics in Prague Vršovice, he became close to his future wife Milena. Together they went on tramps throughout high school. As a tramp and a mánička (he wore his hair long), he experienced various confrontations with the State Security, which they tried to avoid as much as possible. He graduated in 1973 and then went on to graduate from college with a degree in economics. In 1978 he married his first love Milena, with whom he built a house and raised two sons. In 1979, after a year of compulsory military service, Ladislav Kročák started a job at the National Bank, but soon left because he refused to join the Communist Party. For the same reason, he could not find another job corresponding to his education, so he went to work manually in a cleaning service company, where he remained throughout the 1980s. The Kročák’s family continued to visit into the countryside, became interested in Indigenous peoples of the Americas’s culture and participated in the subculture of Czech “Indians” who organized meetings and camps. They slept in tipis, created Indian clothing, cooked in a natural way, and recreated Indian customs according to available information. In 1992, a Canadian crew made a documentary about them, ‘If Only I Were an Indian’. In 1990 Ladislav Kročák co-founded the Czech Indian Corral, which currently brings together supporters of Indigenous peoples of the Americas’s cultures in the Czech Republic. Around 2002 they stopped being active in the subculture of Czech “Indians”. Ladislav Kročák and his wife have been running an Indian-style handicraft business since the early 1990s. Since 2012, the Kročák’s family have specialized in the production of so-called shaman drums and accompanying drumming workshops.
