# Many Many Moons/Preface

PREFACE
The specific words and phrases which the American Indian utters in song and ceremony are few and fragmentary. In their original forms of expression the utterances of Indian dance, song, and ritual are often crude and inadequate. Literal translation, therefore, will rarely reveal the emotional and ideational content of a ceremony. For example, the only words uttered in the course of a long and richly meaningful scal-pdance song may be the following:
The few fragmentary phrases may be repeated over and over again, interspersed with apparently meaningless syllables and ejaculations. The meager phrase in a medicine song may be slight in its denotation; it can represent merely the peaks of an emotional flight, or it can merely symbolize a great situation. Yet if the fragmentary ideas be interpreted against a background of legend, or supplemented by the accompanying incidents of the dance,-its music, postures, gestures, and vocal embellishments,-if they be refracted through the prismatic glass of Indian imagination, the few words that are uttered may suggest ​a great colorful complex of ideas and emotions. The poems of Indian theme in Parts I and III of this volume, therefore, are in no sense literal translations of original utterances of aboriginal song and council-talk; they are, rather, very free, broad interpretations. I have endeavored to interpret most broadly the original Indian motives through their suggestive connotations, in the light of Indian symbolism and mysticism, of the mythology and superstition involved, and of the attendant ceremonies.
Although I have been very free in my interpretations, I have endeavored to maintain steadily and accurately the consciousness of the genuine American Indian of today, his peculiar mental and emotional slants. I have sought, moreover, to maintain consistently the point of view of the modern reservation type of red man,—more copper or bronze than red.-who in his present transition from the primitive wild life to the new civilization offers a paradoxical amalgam or mosaic of the old and the new, the ideal and the material, the majestic and the grotesque.
The romantic red man in the picturesque setting of war-dances and ambuscaded prairie schooners has gone the way of the buffalo, the flintlock, and the stone-ax. With him has gone much of the romantic beauty of the wild yesterdays; the old glory of the lawless Indian frontier has grown a bit faded and tawdry. Yet in the life and the aspirations of the red man of today, and particularly in the character of the more remote, primitive Northern woods Indian. there is a new, strange, often bizarre beauty which, ​because of the economic and social complexities created by modern reservation life, is infinitely more colorful and kaleidoscopic than that of the old romantic days. In this transitional type of the Original American there is a rugged charm distinctive of the New World, and of the race of pioneers that struggled here to beat back the wilderness and to fling out the borders of a new civilization. About this bronze figure, the symbol of our vanished West and of our beaten borderlands, hovers a wild poetic beauty as peculiarly American in fragrance as the redolence of burning pine, or the odor of a cornfield after rain.
Beneath the drab surface of the modern transitional type of Indian in his semi-civilized setting of the reservation there is comedy, cosmic tragedy, and a wealth of literary materials that are epic in sweep. Consider the pathos of his desperate struggle of three centuries to stem the tide of a subtle, irresistible civilization, to withstand the ravages of the white man's diseases, to beat off the packs of astute grafters who were ever ready to pounce upon him as wolves upon a wounded deer. In the great drama enacted in the American wilderness these bronze stoics have played every rôle,—hero and villain, hunter and hunted, victor and vanquished; yesterday defiant, imperious, battling victoriously with naked hands against storm and wind and snow and cyclone, against man and beast and hunger and pestilence; today poverty-stricken, servile, making their exit in the West and the North, a handful of broken people, a thin line of bedraggled figures in the twilight, straggling across the desert ​with muffled foot fall into the Valley of Night to the ultimate companionship of the stars.
In much of the seeming cacophony of the modern Indian's music there is lyric poetry. In the primitive dances to which the pagan elder folk have clung so tenaciously, and in which today the Indian sings his soul out of its rags back for a moment to the old glory of the wild days, there is a pungent, elemental charm. Rugged dignity and power mark his council oratory. A pagan spiritual beauty glitters in all the religious rituals that express his cosmic theory; for his pantheistic conception of the phenomena of nature is sublime in its personification of the wilderness, in its humanization of earth and sky and water, of beast and bird and reptile, of the flash of the lightning, the rumble of thunder, and the roar of the big winds. In the supernatural world created by his imagination. there is a weird mysticism; for the Indian walks through life ever beckoned by unseen hands, ever communing with the ghosts of the unseen spirit of beast and devil and god.
His life is not, however, wholly in shadow; it has its high lights of comedy and humor. There is humor in his naïve attempts to adapt himself to the white man's mode of living with its baffling machines and its incomprehensible customs; sometimes a ludicrous incongruity in his domestic environment with its agglomeration of primitive birch-basket and battered alarm clock, papoose cradle and broken sewing machine,—the latter often purchased as a thing of ornament rather than of utility,—quaint stone pestle and ​mortar and the badge of affluence, that sine qua non of Indian aristocracy, the cheap talking machine eternally playing its one record. There is unconscious humor, and often subtle wit, in much of his talk, and in his modern dialect, a hybrid language in which the simple dignity of the old poetic diction is now shot. through with the mixed idioms, the crudities, and the twisted phrases of borderland slang and of French-Canadian patois. The comedy in his character,—largely the humor of grotesqueness, inconsistency, and paradox,—is best suggested perhaps by the incongruities of the costume which he often wears at some idealistic old ceremonial dance; a nondescript outfit composed of buckskin moccasins and conspicuous white man's underwear, beaded medicine bag and shoddy trousers, eagle feathers and a battered derby hat.
It is the spirit of this more modern type of Indian,—and particularly of the more remote Northern woods Indian of Algonquian stock, with his peculiar anachronistic combination of the primitive and the modern, the tragic and the comic, the ideal and the real, the romantic and the drab, the spiritual and the material,—it is the spirit of this transitional type of red man which I wish to catch in Part I and Part III of this volume. I desire, furthermore, not only to catch the spirit of the woods Indian, but also, through the nature poems in Part II, to capture something of the atmosphere of the Indian's environment, of his setting of the Northern wilderness. If, therefore, the poems in this book convey in some degree ​the wild beauty of the North, and of its wilderness folk, a beauty so inadequately expressed by the printed word, I shall be most happy. If they do not thus succeed—it was Walter Savage Landor—was it not?—who said, "There is delight in singing, though none hear beside the singer."
Although a few of the poems in Parts I and III presuppose on the part of the reader some knowledge of the American Indian, most of them will readily yield their meaning without the aid of supplementary notes. I have incorporated in each poem most of the special information concerning Indian folk-lore of which the casual reader may not be informed. Likewise, the correct pronunciation of the various Chippewa words which are used is made clear by the accents and the phonetic spelling; and their meanings may be readily grasped from their context. However, for the benefit of the reader who may be interested in further details concerning the ceremonials and legends that lie at the foundation of certain of the poems, I have added a brief section of expository comments in the Appendix, beginning on page 71. I suggest that the reader glance at these supplementary notes before reading the poems in Part I and Part III upon which they bear.
I wish to take this opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Miss Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, to Mr. Carl Sandburg, and to Professor Stuart P. Sherman of the University of Illinois for their encouragement and their helpful suggestions, and to many other friends for valuable criticisms. Lew Sarett.