468 | ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1958 
ber to be “a more comprehensive and coherent view of native Pueblo 
life than any scientific volume on the southwest.” 
A few American painters (Sharp, Phillips, Blumenschein) had also 
discovered the Southwest before the opening of the 20th century. 
Blumenschein’s graphic commentary on the acculturation process, 
which shows two Indians mounted on merry-go-round horses, had 
appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1899. 
Among the poets who became interested, Mary Austin soon took 
the lead. She became the key figure in the use of Indian material for 
literary purposes, and her extremely positive attitude toward the 
cultures of the Indians influenced many others to seek inspiration 
in their art. She characterized her “Amerindian Songs” as being 
“Reexpressed from the Originals.” Some of these first appeared in 
“Poetry” (1917), along with comparable interpretations by Frank 
S. Gordon, Alice Corbin Henderson, and Constance Lindsay Skinner. 
Mary Austin wrote plays and stories, too. She seems to have moved 
from a romantic primitivism to a more and more realistic handling of 
Indian themes, as exemplified by her play “The Arrow Maker,” pro- 
duced on Broadway in 1911, and her “One-Smoke Stories” (1934), one 
of her last books. Nor should the fact be overlooked that four anthol- 
ogies containing translations of American Indian songs and poetry 
have appeared in this century (George W. Cronyn, “The Path of the 
Rainbow,” 1918 and 1934; Nellie Barnes, “American Indian Love 
Lyrics and Other Verse,” 1925; Margot Astrov, “The Winged Ser- 
pent,” 1946; and A. Grove Day, “The Sky Clears,” 1951). 
In the 20th century, the Indian has also reappeared in American 
plays, particularly in the work of the regional dramatists. While the 
setting is frequently the historic past, the problems the native faces 
in the acculturation process are sometimes dramatized. Both “Strong- 
heart” (1905) and “Cherokee Night” (1936) are examples of this 
theme. In prose fiction, we also find that anthropologists, inspired by 
Bandelier and the stories collected in Elsie Clews Parsons’ “American 
Indian Life” (1922), entered the field. “Laughing Boy,” a Literary 
Guild book of 1929, by Oliver LaFarge, and “Hawk Over Whirlpools” 
by Ruth Underhill (1940) are outstanding illustrations. In “Amer- 
ica in Fiction,” the authors call attention to the fact that “now that he 
is on reservations, not a military foe, and generally not an economic 
competitor, the Indian is a subject of great interest, so much so that 
more fiction has been written about him in recent years than about 
any other ethnic group except the Negro. In many works of fiction, 
he has been given central prominence, his cultural complex has been 
detailed, and much attention has been paid to his problems of ad- 
justing himself to the dominating civilization that surrounds him.” * 
2% Otis W. Coan and Richard G. Lillard, America in Fiction. “An Annotated List of 
Novels that Interpret Aspects of Life in the United States,’ 3d ed., pp. 161-162. Stanford. 
1949. 
