American Indian life

BY SEVERAL OF ITS STUDENTS
EDITED BY ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS ILLUSTRATED BY C. GRANT LA FARGE
NEW YORK
MCMXXII
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
copyright, 1922, by b. w. huebsch, inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
“She always says she will come, and sometimes she comes and sometimes she doesn’t come. I was so surprised when I first came out here to find that Indians were like that,” the wife of the Presbyterian Missionary in an Indian town in New Mexico was speaking, as you readily infer, on her servant question.
“Where did you get your impressions of Indians before you came here?”
“From Fenimore Cooper. I used to take his books out, one right after the other from the library at New Canaan, Connecticut, where I grew up.”
At that time, during the youth of this New Englander past middle age, few anthropological monographs on Indian tribes had been written, but it is doubtful if such publications are to be found in New England village libraries even to-day, and it is more than doubtful that if they were in the libraries anybody would read them; anthropologists themselves have been known not to read them. Between these forbidding monographs and the legends of Fenimore Cooper, what is there then to read for a girl who is going to spend her life among Indians or, in fact, for anyone who just wants to know more about Indians?
From these considerations, among others, this book was conceived. The idea of writing about the life of the Indian for the General Reader is not novel, to be sure, to anthropologists. Appearances to the contrary, anthropologists have no wish to keep their science or any part of it esoteric. They are too well aware, for one thing, that facilities for the pursuit of anthropology are dependent more or less on popular interest, and that only too often tribal cultures have disappeared in America as elsewhere before people became interested enough in them to learn about them.