American Indian life. Various
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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.
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.
When Pretty-weasel needed help in dressing a hide or pitching a tent, her sisters and cousins of the Sore-lip clan came as visitors, often bringing moccasins and gewgaws for their little clansman, Takes-the-pipe. One of the sisters stood out more clearly than the rest, a lusty wench who would pull Deaf-bull by the ear and pour water on his face when he took an afternoon nap. He in turn would throw her on the ground and tickle her till she bawled for mercy. Another salient figure was the grandmother, old Muskrat, who used to croon the boy to sleep with a lullaby: “The dog has eaten, he is smoking. Haha, huhu! Haha, huhu!” Whenever she came to the refrain she raised a wrinkled, mutilated hand, and snapped what remained of her fingers in the child’s face.
The people were always traveling back and forth in those days. Now Takes-the-pipe was throwing stones into the Little Bighorn, then with other boys he was chasing moths in the Wolf Mountains. When he caught one he rubbed it against his breast, for they said that was the way to become a swift runner. One fall, the Mountain Crow traveled to the mouth of the Yellowstone to visit their kin of the River band. All winter was spent there. It was fun coasting down-hill on a buffalo-rib toboggan and spinning tops on the smooth ice. Each boy tried to upset his neighbor’s with his own, and when he succeeded he would cry, “I have knocked you out!” Takes-the-pipe was a good player, but once he came home inconsolable because his fine new top was stolen, and another time a bigger lad had cheated, “knocking him out” with a stone deftly substituted for the wooden toy. His mother comforted him saying, “That boy is crazy! His father is of the Bad-honors clan, that’s why he acts that way!”
Takes-the-pipe was still a little fellow when Deaf-bull made him a bow and arrows, and taught him to shoot. Now he ran about, letting fly his darts against birds and rabbits. There was ample chance to gain skill in archery. The boys would tie together a bundle of grass and set it on a knoll, then all shot at this target, and the winner took all his competitors’ arrows. Whenever Takes-the-pipe brought home a sheaf of darts, his father would encourage him, saying, “You’ll be like Sharp-horn, who always brings down his buffalo with the first shot.” And when his son had killed his first cottontail, Deaf-bull proudly called Sliding-beaver, a renowned Whistling-water, feasted him royally and had him walk through camp, leading Takes-the-pipe mounted on his horse and proclaiming his success in a laudatory chant.
One spring there was great excitement. The supply of meat was exhausted, yet the buffalo remained out of sight. Scouts were sent to scour the country in search of game, but in vain. At last Sharp-horn offered to lure the buffalo by magic. At the foot of a cliff he had the men build a corral. He summoned Deaf-bull to be his