Introduction
In trailing about over
the west for the last twenty-five years I have come into contact with
some ten or fifteen tribes of these people and have made studies of them
in their pathetic attempt to adapt themselves to our civilization, and
in the hope of showing one or two little known traits of these
"folks" I submit this book of stories in the hope that they
will carry the reader a little way along the road by which my own
conclusions have been reached. There are a thousand writers to emphasize
the harsh and cruel side of the Indian. There are very few who care to
dwell upon their commonplace every-day human side.
—Hamlin Garland, from a
discarded introduction to The
Book of the American Indian
When The Book of the American Indian was
first published in 1923, the Indians had long been resettled upon various
reservations. The warfare between American Indians and white settlers had
reached its height in the 1870s, and by the late 1890s virtually all
tribes had been relocated to a vast system of reservations. By 1901, the
76 million people of the United States included about 270,000 Indians
divided among more than 300 tribes on more than 160 reservations. Hamlin
Garland’s stories were originally written between 1890 and 1905, during
the difficult years of transition, when Indians were passing from free and
independent peoples to government wards dependent upon a government dole.
Unlike such writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Garland based his stories on
careful, accurate observation occasioned by repeated trips to reservations
throughout the West and upon interviews with Indians who were struggling
to make a new life on reservations. His stories capture both the
rebellious spirit of Indians still smarting from submission to an invader
and the pathos inherent in what one reviewer called "the Indian of
the last days, the Indian living, half submissive, half rebellious, in
fear of the ‘agent’ sent by the great incomprehensible Government at
Washington . . . the Indian who, with whatever sombre smouldering of
revolt in his heart, had at last accepted the white man as master."
The strength of Garland’s stories lies in their sympathetic depiction of
the difficulties inherent in this "acceptance," for the Indians
Garland encountered were just beginning to convert to an anglicized
agrarian economy, and government policy was shifting from an earlier
optimism that Indians would readily and eagerly merge into white culture
to a more pessimistic assessment that saw indigenous peoples as incapable
of fitting in with the dominant culture. In all of his stories, Garland
reflects the stereotypes of his age: his Indian characters are a proud and
tragic people facing with difficulty an unjust and at times brutal
government bureaucracy. Garland was very much a product of the late
nineteenth century, convinced that science, and particularly evolutionary
determinism, could explain both natural and social phenomena, and just as
convinced that white civilization was more "advanced" than
others. He also was a writer with considerable compassion for others
"less advanced" and sought through his writing to make
conditions better for all people. This spirit of reform, coupled with a
realism based on his own intimate acquaintance with Native Americans,
separates his fiction from that of other white writers, who tended to
demonize the Indians. To Garland, American Indians were above all else
human beings with virtues and faults identical with those of other
peoples. Indians were simply "less evolved" along the continuum
of cultures. As Garland recalled thirty years after his travels among the
reservations,
I took the red man as I found him. To
me he was a product of his environment, like the eagle or the mountain
lion. To call him a fiend, a devil, was unscientific. The question of
his origin, the basis of his customs should not be clouded by racial or
religious prejudice, nor confused by the hate of those who desired the
lands he occupied. In short the red people were to me human beings who
had come up along another line of civilization from ours. Although in
some ways our inferiors, they possessed certain singularly noble traits.
Garland’s task in his Indian fiction
was both to celebrate the nobility of American Indians and also to point
to their shared humanity with the dominant culture. Garland’s attitude
is at times condescending and paternalistic, but his stories are of
interest for readers today because they illustrate a sincere and
well-intentioned white reformer coming to understand a culture radically
at odds with his own—and discovering in the process that his own culture
is less "advanced" than he had supposed.
. . . snip . . .
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