American Indian life

by Unknown

Such, then, are the outlines of the history of the native, American race and civilization. It is a long and complexly rich story, only partly unraveled. Those who wish it in greater fullness will find it in Wissler’s The American Indian. Only enough has been sketched here to show that modern anthropology is an inductive science with a minimum of speculation; that it aims at truly historical reconstructions and is beginning to achieve them; and that it lies in the nature of its tasks to distinguish and analyze the several native culture areas or local types of Indians before proceeding to conclusions based on combinations.

Therefore it is, that many small items of ethnic knowledge acquire considerable importance. From the average man’s point of view, it is of little moment that the Zuñi farm and the Yurok and Nootka do not, or that the former refuse to marry their dead wives’ sisters and the latter insist on it. At best, such bits of facts have for the layman only the interest of idle curiosities, of antiquarian fragments. To the specialist, however, they become dependable means to a useful end, much as intimate knowledge of the position of arteries and nerves serves the surgeon.

But, just as the exact understanding of anatomy which modern medicine enjoys, bulks to infinitely more than any one anatomist could ever have discovered, so with ethnology. No one mind could ever observe or assemble and digest all the cultural facts that are needed. Many workers are busy, have been systematically busy for two or three generations. Though they may, now and then, enliven their toil by a scientific quarrel over this or that set of facts or interpretation, they are inherently coöperating, laboring cumulatively at a great joint enterprise. Sometimes, they divide their interests topically: one specializes on social customs, another on material arts, a third along lines of religion. But, in the main, the cultural context is so important that it has been found most productive for each investigator to try to learn everything possible about all the phases of culture of a single tribe, or, at most, of two or three tribes.

To do this, he “goes into the field.” That is, he takes up his residence, for a continuous period or repeatedly for several years, among a tribe, on its reservation or habitat. He enters into as close relations as possible with its most intelligent or authoritative members. He acquires all he can of their language, reduces it to writing, perhaps compiles texts, a dictionary or grammar. Day after day he records notes from visual observation or the memory of the best informants available on the industries, beliefs, government, family life, ceremonies, wars, and daily occupations of his chosen people. And with all this, there flow in his personal experiences and reactions. The final outcome is a monograph—a bulky, detailed, often tedious, but fundamental volume, issued by the government or a scientific institution.

It is from intensive studies such as these, that the stories which form the present volume have sprung as a by-product. Have sprung as a sort of volunteer crop, it might be said, under the stimulus of the editorial suggestion of Dr. Parsons. The monographs have a way of sticking pretty closely to the objective facts recorded. The mental workings of the people whose customs are described, are subjective, and therefore much more charily put into print. The result is that every American anthropologist with field experience, holds in his memory many interpretations, many convictions as to how his Indians feel, why they act as they do in a given situation, what goes on inside of them. This psychology of the Indian is often expressed by the frontiersman, the missionary and trader, by the man of the city, even. But it has been very little formulated by the very men who know most, who have each given a large block of their lives to acquiring intensive and exact information about the Indian and his culture.

There is, thus, something new, something of the nature of an original contribution, in each of these stories; and they are reliable. To many of us, the writing of our tale has been a surprise and of value to ourselves. We had not realized how little we knew of the workings of the Indian mind on some sides, how much on others.

The fictional form of presentation devised by the editor has definite merit. It allows a freedom in depicting or suggesting the thoughts and feelings of the Indian, such as is impossible in a formal, scientific report. In fact, it incites to active psychological treatment, else the tale would lag. At the same time the customs depicted are never invented. Each author has adhered strictly to the social facts as he knew them. He has merely selected those that seemed most characteristic, and woven them into a plot around an imaginary Indian hero or heroine. The method is that of the historical novel, with emphasis on the history rather than the romance.

There is but one important precedent for this undertaking,[1] and that single-handed instead of collective, and therefore depictive of one people only, the Keresan Pueblos. This is The Delight Makers of Bandelier, archæologist, archivist, historian, and ethnologist of a generation ago; and this novel still renders a more comprehensive and coherent view of native Pueblo life than any scientific volume on the Southwest.

The present book, then, is a picture of native American life, in much the sense that a series of biographies of one statesman, poet, or common citizen from each country of Europe would yield a cross-sectional aspect of the civilization of that continent. France and Russia, Serbia and Denmark, would each be represented with its national peculiarities; and yet the blended effect would be that of a super-national culture. So with our Indians. It is through the medium of the intensive and special coloring of each tribal civilization, that the common elements of Indian culture are brought out most truthfully, even though somewhat indirectly.

There are only a few points at which the composite photograph, produced by these twenty-seven stories, should be used with caution, and these disproportions or deficiencies are unavoidable at present. The first of them is religion. The book is likely to make the impression that some sixty per cent, of Indian life must have been concerned with religion. This imbalance is due to the fact that religion has become the best known aspect of Indian life. Ritual and ceremony follow exact forms which the native is able to relate with accuracy from memory, long after the practices have become defunct. Moreover, once his confidence is gained, he often delights in occupying his mind with the matters of belief and rite that put an emotional stamp on his youth. Social usages are much more plastic, more profoundly modified to suit each exigency as it arises, and therefore more difficult to learn and portray. The mechanical and industrial arts have a way of leaving but pallid recollections, once they have been abandoned for the white man’s manufactures; and to get them recreated before one’s eyes is usually very time-consuming. Thus, through a tacit coordination of Indians and ethnologists to exploit the vein of most vivid productivity, religion has become obtruded; and some excess must be discounted. Yet the over-proportion is perhaps all for the best. For the Indian is, all in all, far more religious than we, and the popular idea errs on the side of ignoring this factor. The stories are substantially truthful in their effect, in that the average Indian did spend infinitely more time on affairs of religion than of war, for instance.