A merican Indians

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31143, 20 August 1966, Page 4

A merican Indians

American Indian Tales and Legends. By Vladimir Hulpach, illustrated by Miloslav Troup. Paul Hamlyn. 237 pp.

The stories in this book have been drawn from the legends of thirty tribes, of widely differing regions. There were those of the north-west who lived by the sea and hunted whales, and far to the south of them the Pueblo Indians who suffered from droughts; there were eastern tribes who lived in deep forests and westerners who travelled over the great prairies and invented talcs about the thousands of stars they saw in the wide skies. This selection can be roughly divided into creation myths and tales about animals which often have a simple moral implicit warning against greed or vanity. Some were apparently modified after the coming of the white man to include references to the evil of fire-water, and there are two, from the Senecas and the Hurons, which show the amused scorn the Indians felt for the palefaces’ preoccupation with papers and particularly for the palefaces’ God with his black book. Although this is classified by the publishers as a children’s book, it will be of considerable interest to adults. Not only are the stories themselves quite different in tone from European myths and folk-tales, being generally monotheistic and peacefully inclined, but the illustrations are well worth attention in their own right. By Miloslav Troup, they are numerous and brilliant in a sophisticated totem-pole style that accords excellently with the text.

The “As It Happens” column in “The Times” reports the experience of a retired journalist who has been amusing himself by keeping records of weather for 10 months. His statistics show that, over the period, people have been marginally better off than they would have been had the meteorologists’ forecasts come true.