466 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
On the other hand, there was an increasing awareness that authentic 
knowledge of the aboriginal cultures was relevant and desirable in 
the arts. Perhaps this attitude developed along with the emergence 
of a more realistic tradition in American writing. However this may 
be, I think that the publication of Edna Dean Proctor’s “Song of the 
Ancient People” in 1893 represents a transitional case. While it is in 
the high romantic tradition, there is an appended commentary to 
this poem by F. H. Cushing (1857-1900), a pioneer anthropologist 
who went to the Southwest in 1879 and lived among the Zuni for 5 
years. He says he can bear witness to the poet’s “strict fidelity of 
statement, and attempt to show, as one of the Ancient People them- 
selves would be glad to show, how well she has divined their spirit.” 
The volume was illustrated with realistic aquatints made by Julian 
Scott in the Hopi country. No other Indian poem had ever been 
offered to the public with such an aura of authenticity about it—it was 
bound in buckskin with a design taken from Southwestern pottery on 
the cover. 
The inauguration of genuine Indian themes in American concert 
music is ordinarily attributed to Edward MacDowell, whose “Indian 
Suite” was first performed in 1896. But where did he find such 
themes? He was not a frontier boy. He entered the Paris Conserva- 
tory at the age of 14 and did not take up residence here until he was 
27. The fact is that MacDowell exemplifies a repetition of the same 
kind of relationship to the source of his thematic material as was noted 
in the case of Cooper and Longfellow. He got them from Theodore 
Baker, the first trained musician to go into the field and study Indian 
music at first hand. Baker, a German, visited the Seneca Reservation 
and the Carlisle Indian School in the summer of 1880, offering the 
results of his analysis to Leipzig University as a doctoral dissertation. 
But he was not a composer, nor was Alice C. Fletcher, whose mono- 
graph on Omaha songs (1893) initiated the study of Indian music in 
American anthropology. However, two of the songs she collected, 
“Shupida” and the “Omaha Tribal Prayer,” undoubtedly have been 
among the most widely circulated examples of authentic Indian music 
in American culture. Together with three other Indian songs, they 
appear in “Indian Lore,” a pamphlet in the Merit Badge Series of the 
Boy Scouts of America. In the past 6 years, approximately 47,000 
copies of this booklet have been printed. Scouts who aspire to the 
merit badge in Indian lore must be able to “sing three Indian songs 
including the Omaha Tribal Prayer and tell something of their 
meaning.” Since 1911, there have been more than 18,700 American 
boys who have won this distinction. 
Following the lead of MacDowell, other composers began to make 
increasing use of Indian themes, though only a few made direct con- 
tact with the reservation Indians. Among them were Burton, Cad- 
