The purpose that a foreword serves to the reading public is ostensibly
to express its writer’s endorsement of the material presented and of the
mode of treatment. In this instance the purpose is heartily avowed. The
monograph in hand forms a contribution to the series of studies being
pursued widely among scholars whose aim is to piece together portions of
the picture of culture of the Indians of the Southeast. Our knowledge of
the culture properties of native tribes in any area where their
development has been going on for centuries in their original seats
comes necessarily by gradual steps. These may seem disconnected in the
minds of laymen who are in haste to see the whole story completed.
Perhaps only the pioneer investigator knows how long and intimately a
people must be studied by dwelling in their midst before their ways of
life become clear enough to be understood and discussed. Collections of
data, historical, descriptive and functional, have to be made and
preserved in the form of notes and actual specimens. When these ends are
accomplished, the picture of tribal life takes definite shape, and
another gap in the history of a people is closed. These are the
requirements for carrying on in a somewhat new undertaking in the line
of history, namely ethno-history.
Studies of a people’s physical structure, their psychology, language,
religion and government contribute their share. On the material side
their crafts developed to supply economic needs and the art involved in
the crafts themselves must be illustrated with accumulations of
specimens. These requirements the author of the following study has had
well in mind for a considerable space of time, and he has treated them
with conservative judgment and a regard for their implications with
botany and ecology. Such remarks applied to the paper constitute the
ethnologist’s endorsement.
It is a splendid thing for man of the present to take time to stabilize
his mind to contemplating the achievements of tribes inhabiting our
continent as a prologue to the affairs of the present. Where is the
brash critic to persist in the claim that the natives of America have no
original elements of “civilization” either from the early or late past,
or in the present? The Cherokee have provided an answer. Contemporary
literature has amassed the evidence nor alone in the series of volumes
from the University of Oklahoma Press, but in prose and poetry known
throughout the nation. It offers a compendious chapter in the epic of
America. Each additional study adds a paragraph of importance to the
whole.
The study to follow contributes a detail of existing knowledge of the
art-crafts of the Cherokee. As such it will prove to be another source
reference to the Cherokee way of life in art and its expression in
concrete form. The utilities have been and still are to Indians a means
of finding outlet for their aesthetic urges. Art and crafts are merged
in the output. Other fields lie open for further attempts to perform its
functions in national life by issuing successive publications dealing
with its cultural material, thus laying foundations for that basic
teaching we fondly call Americanism.
FRANK G. SPECK
Department of Anthropology,
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
1952