diversity and of scientific information. Among anthropologists,
only a very few, like the Omaha Indian Francis La Flesche (not in-
cluded in this volume), thought of their work primarily as pre-
serving for Indian peoples a record of their past. Most anthropolo-
gists wrote for one another, and in an occasional volume such as
this one, for the general public, hoping to contribute to cross-cul-
tural understanding. Anthropologists did not compile their
monographs to benefit the people they were studying, although
these splendid ethnographies did prove in many cases to be use-
ful to latter-day Native Americans, a happy if inadvertent by-
product.

The second important characteristic of American anthropol-
ogy in the 1920s and preceding decades is that it was "salvage" an-
thropology. It was an attempt to salvage what was left of the old
ways before they disappeared completely. Anthropologists
wanted to describe, not the impact of Europeans on Native Amer-
icans, for that was a sordid tale, but how Native Americans had
lived on the North American continent before the Europeans ar-
rived. Most of these stories are set in the time just before contact
with incoming Europeans; in a few there are intimations of what
is soon to come. Few of the societies described here were still func-
tioning in 1920 in anything like the old way. Most American In-
dian peoples had long since been conquered militarily or pushed
onto reservations or been forcibly assimilated, their children
taken away to school and forbidden to speak their native lan-
guage and their religion driven underground. When anthropolo-
gists went into the "field" to study an American Indian group,
they did not sit all day in the center of an Indian encampment or
village and record what was going on. They went to a reservation
and looked for an "informant," usually an elderly person who re-
membered the old ways or knew the old ceremonies and was will-
ing to describe them, often for an hourly wage. From the pains-
taking recording of texts and cultural descriptions thus gleaned,
and often supplemented by archaeological and historical evi-
dence, the anthropologist would piece together a description of
what the culture had once been: its material culture, kinship sys-
tem, tribal government, religious ceremonies. The relative stress

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