by Joan Mark

This is an amazing book, a collection of short fictional stories
about American Indian life that are as vivid and convincing today
as when they were first published seventy years ago. To us, read-
ing them near the end of the twentieth century, they open a win-
dow not only on how indigenous peoples of the Americas lived
before the coming of the Europeans but also on American an-
thropology of the 1920s. Here we catch a glimpse of what that
small but significant group of people who called themselves an-
thropologists were doing and what they considered important as
they went about studying American Indians.

Elsie Clews Parsons asked many of her colleagues to contribute
to this book, and they could all do so because they were nearly all
specialists in the American Indians. That is the first important
characteristic of American anthropology in the 1920s. Research
was focused almost exclusively on Native Americans. Margaret
Mead would soon be the anomaly. Still an undergraduate at Bar-
nard College when this collection was put together, she would, in
a few years, insist on going to Samoa for her first field work, say-
ing that she wanted to study a functioning culture and not an-
other dying American Indian group. But nearly everyone else
studied American Indians, not only because they were geograph-
ically so near, but precisely because they were thought to be dying
out, not as individuals but as societies. It was urgent to record as
many of the old ways as possible before the last instance or even
the last memory of them disappeared completely. The reason it
was considered urgent was that cultures represent alternate social
arrangements from which we might learn something as well as
clusters of irreplaceable historical data. For a culture to die out
unrecorded, to become extinct, was analogous to a biological spe-
cies becoming extinct. In each case it meant an irreparable loss of

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