THE INDIAN IN LITERATURE. 1 



By Hebman F. C. ten Kate. 



INTRODUCTION. 



Many peoples of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and America have been 

 the subjects of romance and poetry. Among these the American 

 Indian and his country occupy a prominent place. The Indian has 

 been the subject perhaps as often of novelists and poets as of 

 artists, but, on the whole, the latter have been more successful in 

 depicting his true character. 



Among the exotic races of man the " Redskin " might well-nigh be 

 called classical. From the very first a great attraction and charm 

 went out from the Indian of the wilderness not less than from the 

 brown Polynesian. Taken in the widest sense, no people are gener- 

 ally better known than the heroes of Fenimore Cooper and Gustave 

 Aimard. The courage and other martial virtues of the Indian, his 

 tragic history, have appealed for more than a century to the inter- 

 est and sympathy of cultured society in North America and Europe. 

 And yet that same society, even in America, knows really very little 

 about him. It must be borne in mind, however, that it is only during 

 the last thirty-five or forty years that ethnologists have begun to 

 study the Indian and his psychological characteristics on a scientific 

 basis. 



Although exotism in literature with regard to other countries and 

 peoples has been more than once the subject of criticism and com- 

 ment — e. g., the works of Pierre Loti and Lafcadio Hearn — a spe- 

 cial analytic and synthetic study of the American Indian has 

 never been written, so far as I know. Even in such a pretentious 

 work as L'Exotisme of Cario and Regismanset (2 d edit., Paris, 1911) 

 only six authors on Indian literary subjects are mentioned. The 

 reader looks in vain for Longfellow, Bandelier, Remington, and 

 other well-known names. 



In view of the scanty data concerning this subject I shall try 

 briefly to review the principle literary works in which the Indian 



1 Condensed translation and abstract of papers published in the Dutch magazines 

 De Gids, 1919, and De West-Indische Gids, 1920. 



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