452 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
Cotton Mather’s terser characterization of the “tawney serpents” 
seems almost mild and dignified beside this scathing blast. 
Wrestling with his own day-to-day problems, with the Long Hairs 
not far off, the trans-Mississippi frontiersman was in no position to 
appreciate the extent to which the Indians already had affected 
American culture. And it would be interesting to know how many 
Americans on this frontier had read “Hiawatha.” Certainly, few of 
them could have imagined that, when the West was won and the 
Indians were safely settled on reservations, native arts and crafts 
would be appreciated for their esthetic values and widely exhibited, 
musicians and poets would visit these remaining enclaves of Indian 
culture to study their music and songs at firsthand, and a museum de- 
voted exclusively to the preservation and exhibition of Indian objects 
would be established in the largest city of the Nation. What would 
have surprised them more, perhaps, if they could have looked at a 
Boy Scout Handbook of the 20th century, is the statement that it “is 
a pity that most boys think of headdresses, war whoops, tomahawks, 
and scalps the instant Indians are mentioned. . . . There are so many 
thousands of beautiful and desirable things in their lives that it is 
safe to say that they can offer boys a mighty good code of sport and 
happiness.” And among the other things that would strike the 
frontiersman forcibly would be the requirement that, in order to win 
a merit badge in Indian lore, the Boy Scout must learn the Omaha 
Tribal Prayer. Yes, the Omaha, one of those dastardly Siouan 
tribes—the gut-eating skunks! 
But if the Midwestern frontiersman had been interested enough, 
he would have discovered that the word “skunk,” which he could so 
glibly hurl at the Long Hairs as a derogatory epithet, was derived 
from an Indian language and had entered American speech in the 
17th century. The borrowing of words as well as traits of Indian cul- 
ture, like the use of corn, had been going on for a long time. Re- 
ferred to by anthropologists as cultural diffusion, this kind of cultural 
borrowing is a process that has been occurring throughout the entire 
history of man. It has been one of the main stimuli of cultural 
change. When people of different cultures meet and social inter- 
action takes place, this situation inevitably eventuates in some cultural 
borrowing on the part of either or both peoples. 
In the past two decades, cultural anthropologists in this country 
have devoted increasing attention to detailed studies of the effects of 
Euro-American culture upon the Indians, that is, acculturation, 
rather than confining themselves, as was once the case, primarily 
to the collection of data that would make it possible to reconstruct 
an ethnographic picture of aboriginal life in its undisturbed form. 
On the other hand, although recognizing that in principle accul- 
turation is seldom if ever a one-way process, anthropologists have 
