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,
