An Interlude With Indians
Spin a Silver Coin. By Alberta Hannum. (Michael Joseph. 12s. 6d.)
IF the traditions and trappings of the days of the covered wagons are still remembered outside the confines of Los Angeles and Hollywood it is only fitfully implied by Miss Hannum. Early in her story of the Lippincotts, a young couple who bought a trading post in a reserva- tion of the Navaho Indians, it is apparent that this is to be no white man's saga in a land bereft of the amenities of civilisation. "Wide Ruins" had been built and named from stone relics of an earlier civilisation. What had been desecrated once could be desecrated again, and the property was early on `,` improved" by the acquisi- tion of such aereeable adjuncts to life in the desert as a swimming- bath, a badminton-court and a water,fountain. To the water-fountain there is attached a moral in the form of a water-cup. Before the arrival of the Lippincons it had been the custom of the Indians to drink at a tin cup chained to a water-pipe. The lessons of modern hygiene demanded that the tin cup should be replaced by paper cups that could be discarded after being used once. The Indians took this innovation—as they had taken many before it—in their
stride. They were unable to understand why a relatively efficient cup should be replaced by a type which early in its use showed a ten- dency to leak. But they continued to drink from the fountain— sharing, as before, one cup.
It is, of course, this sublime disregard for the march of progress, this unconscious preservation of racial roots deep in past centuries, which have enabled the Indians to preserve their customs and traditions and legends intact, not only after their numerous defeats at the hands of, relatively, parvenu races, but also now when the foundation of their existence is at stake. Even modern contact with the white man, even a debased form of living on a reservation, has done less than might have been expected to accelerate the slow corruption and pollution of their culture. They remain an anachronism, but an entity, in present-day American civilisation." And they manage to preserve the beguiling charm—the cliché is inevitable—of children.
All this Miss Hannum skilfully conveys against the unpromising background of the Lippincott activities. But fortunately the veneer of American civilisation is rarely allowed to intrude unduly on the Indian incidentals which comprise the broad pattern of the book. And running through the fabric like a brilliant thread is the story of the eight-year-old Indian boy, twelve of whose remarkable paintings are used as illustrations. Of the quality of these paintings—with their superb interpretation of the colour and grace and motion of the desert animals—there can be no doubt. It is a measure of Miss Hannum's achievement that her narrative is a not unworthy accompaniment. Indeed, what might so easily have been narrowed to a bare recital of fact becomes, through taut writing and selective editing, as warm and
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