American Indians might not be so different from Eastern Europeans — both cultures have had to cope with patronizing stereotypes and the seeming collapse of their societies.

That’s the idea behind a program that brought a Slovenian professor to the campus of Haskell Indian Nations University.

“Where I am from, we see a lot of what I call exoticizing,” said Irena Sumi, an assistant professor of anthropology at the Institute for Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

“It means presenting someone as unnatural or different,” she said. “It was that way in America with the Indians — they were portrayed (as) savages, heathens, somebody different from the dominant culture. It’s the same in post-socialist Eastern Europe; only there, it’s the Balkans — Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria and Albania — that have been exoticized.”

Sumi and Hannah Starman, head of the Institute for Ethnic Studies’ Task Force on Jewish Studies and Anti-Semitism, were in Lawrence on Tuesday. Along with Haskell professor Dan Wildcat, they will participate in a 3:30 p.m. soliloquy today in Room 137 at Haskell’s Navarre Hall.

Wildcat, chairman of the American Indian Studies program at Haskell, is one of three U.S. professors taking part in the Slovenia-based Higher Education Support Program.

The program encourages university faculties in the former Yugoslavia and other East European countries to compare how American Indians responded to the loss of their land and liberties in the 1800s with Eastern European countries’ reaction to the fall of the Soviet Union.

Sumi said she and other Eastern European academics were fascinated with American Indian scholar Vine Deloria Jr., who wrote the 1969 best-seller “Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto” and later “God is Red: A Native View on Religion,” among other works.

Much of Deloria’s work, she said, has focused on encouraging Indians to think for themselves rather than letting others define their thoughts.

“This is what we are trying to do,” Sumi said, noting that in academic circles, Wildcat is considered a Deloria disciple.

“Dan is indispensable,” Sumi said. “Without him, we couldn’t pull this off.”