Indians of the Plains

Abstract

Wruex LITTLE Boys play Indian, they often don feather headdresses and, if Santa Claus has been bountiful, costumes suggesting deerskin jackets and leggings decorated with fringe.When our European friends come to our shores, they sometimes expect to see, shouting war whoops, | suppose, along Broadway, Indians not unlike the ones that used to roam our Plains.Most of us, when we think of Indians, envision such items as tipis, war bonnets with trailing feathers, Sitting Bull, ponies, and buffaloes.In other words, we have all come to think of the Plains Indians as the genuine Indian, the ideal Indian-the v ery quintessence of Indian-ness.In many ways, however, the Plains Indians were a highly distinctive group and lived in a rather specialized way or at least in a manner quite different from other kinds of Indians.They were no more typical of the American Indian than the Navajo, the Hopi, or the Iroquois.Yet through the accidents of history, perhaps also by their own role, often heroic, in the epic of the West or indeed as the result of the insistent stereotype of the movies, they have come to usurp in the public mind all other Indians and to represent the Indian way of life.But if in our symbolic use of the Indian we have rubbed out the fascinating local differences, the product of ages of development, and created an image not quite reflecting the Indian of the Plains, we have shown equally little understanding of these very Plainsmen, the variety in their tribal lives and the significance of their customs.Since the Sioux, the Crow, the Blackfoot, and other tribes of the Plains have achieved a predominant position in the national symbolism-the justice of which I shall not deal with here-let us, at least, see the Plains Indians as they were and understand what it was that made them the product of their environment and their history.For it is these Indians that many of us want to know more about.There is, in my opinion, no one as qualified to help us do this as Robert H. Lowie, the author of this book.During his curatorial association with the American Museum of Natural History, he carried on a series of brilliant and painstaking studies of the Plains Indians; sub-Vv v1 FOREWORD sequently as Professor of Anthropology at the University of California he has lectured about them; and throughout his long and outstanding career he has constantly thought about them.He 1s the authority.I feel very fortunate that he has consented to do this book on the Plains in the present series on the life of the American Indians that the American Museum of Natural History is planning to issue.