“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.
Nevertheless, the cost of becoming popular may appear excessive—not
only to the student who begrudges the time and energy that must be
drawn from scientific work, but to the scientist who is asked to
popularize his study in terms repugnant to his sense of truth or
propriety. Hitherto, American publishers appear to have proposed only
to bring Fenimore Cooper up to date, merely to add to the over-abundant
lore of the white man about the Indian.
In this book the white man’s traditions about Indians have been
disregarded. That the writers have not read other traditions from their
own culture into the culture they are describing is less certain. Try
as we may, and it must be confessed that many of us do not try very
hard, few, if any of us, succeed, in describing another culture, of
ridding ourselves of our own cultural bias or habits of mind. Much of
our anthropological work, to quote from a letter from Spinden, “is not
so much definitive science as it is a cultural trait of ourselves.”
For one thing we fail to see the foreign culture as a whole, noting
only the aspects which happen to interest us. Commonly, the interesting
aspects are those which differ markedly from our own culture or those
in which we see relations to the other foreign cultures we have
studied. Hence our classified data give the impression that the native
life is one unbroken round, let us say, of curing or weather-control
ceremonials, of prophylaxis against bad luck, of hunting, or of war.
The commonplaces of behavior are overlooked, the amount of “common
sense” is underrated, and the proportion of knowledge to credulity
is greatly underestimated. In other words the impression we give of
the daily life of the people may be quite misleading, somewhat as if
we described our own society in terms of Christmas and the Fourth
of July, of beliefs about the new moon or ground hogs in February,
of city streets in blizzards and after, of strikes and battleships.
Unfortunately, the necessarily impressionistic character of the
following tales, together with their brevity, renders them, too,
subject to the foregoing criticism. Of this, Dr. Kroeber in the
Introduction will have more to say, as well as of his impression of how
far we have succeeded in presenting the psychological aspects of Indian
culture.
The problems presented by the culture, problems of historical
reconstruction, Dr. Kroeber will also refer to, but discussion of the
problems, of such subjects as culture areas, as the current phrase
goes, as diffusion and acculturation, will not be presented in this
book—it is a book of pictures. But if the reader wants to learn
of how the problems are being followed up, he is directed to the
bibliographical notes in the appendix. If the pictures remain pictures
for him, well and good; if they lead him to the problems, good and
better. Anthropology is short on students.