On the side of economics and government, the book is underdone. It is so, because ethnological knowledge on these topics is insufficient. It is difficult to say why. Possibly ethnologists have not become sufficiently interested or trained. But economic and political institutions are unquestionably difficult to learn about. They are the first to crumble on contact with Anglo-Saxon or Spanish civilization. So they lack the definiteness of ceremonialism, and their reconstruction from native memories is a bafflingly intricate task.
As regards daily life, personal relations, and the ambitions and ideals of the individual born into aboriginal society, in other words the social psychology of the Indian, we have done much better. In fact, collectively we have brought out much that is not to be found anywhere in the scientific monographs, much even that we had not realized could be formulated. This element seems to me to contain the greatest value of the book, and to be one that should be of permanent utility to historians and anthropologists, as well as to the public which is fortunately free from professional trammels. The exhibit of the workings of the Indian mind which these tales yield in the aggregate, impresses me as marked by a rather surprising degree of insight and careful accuracy.
Only at one point have we broken down completely: that of humor. One might conclude from this volume that humor was a factor absent from Indian life. Nothing would be more erroneous. Our testimony would be unanimous on this score. And yet we have been unable to introduce the element. The failure is inevitable. Humor is elusive because its understanding presupposes a feeling for the exact psychic situation of the individual involved, and this in turn implies thorough familiarity with the finest nuances of his cultural setting. We could have introduced Indian jokes, practical ones and witty ones, but they would have emerged deadly flat, and their laughs would have sounded made to order. An Indian himself, or shall we say, a contemporary of the ancients, may let his fancy play, and carry over to us something of his reaction: witness Aristophanes, Plautus, Horace. But the reconstructor, if he is wise, leaves the task unattempted. That prince of historical novelists, Walter Scott, for the most part collapses sadly when he tries to inject into his romances of the Middle Ages, the humor that marks his modern novels of Scotland; and so far as he salvages anything, it is by substituting the humor of his own day for the actual mediæval one. Hypatia is a superb picture of the break-down of Roman civilization; but how silly and boring are its humorous passages! A greater artist, in Thaïs, and another in Salammbô, have wisely evaded attempting the impossible, and, at most, touched the bounds of irony. Where the masters have succumbed or refrained, it is well that we scientists, novices in the domain of fiction, should hold off; though we all recognize both the existence and the importance of humor in Indian life. This element, then, the reader must accept our bare word for—or supply from his own discrimination and intuition.
A. L. Kroeber
AMERICAN INDIAN LIFE
Takes-the-pipe, a Crow Warrior
I
Horses neighing, women scurrying to cover, the report of guns, his mother, Pretty-weasel, gashing her legs for mourning,—that was Takes-the-pipe’s earliest memory. Later he learned that his own father, a famous warrior of the Whistling-water clan, had fallen in the fight and that his “father,” Deaf-bull, was really a paternal uncle who had married the widow. No real father could have been kinder than Deaf-bull. If anything, he seemed to prefer his brother’s son to his own children, always petting him and favoring him with the choicest morsels.