Books: Good & Bad Indians

THE ENEMY GODS—Oliver La Farge—Bought on Mifflin ($2.50).

A decade of popular interest in the Indians of the Southwest has produced a general social betterment among the tribesmen, a considerable number of Indian gigolos, a few serious pieces of fiction. Of this fiction the work of Oliver La Farge, notably his Pulitzer Prize-winning Laughing Boy, has stood out as the best, marked by accurate observation, sensitive understanding of the complex Indian psychology, a respect for their cultural dignity. Anthropologist turned writer, an official advisor to the Hopi, a director of the National Association on Indian Affairs, Oliver La Farge has made himself an Indian spokesman in Washington as well as in fiction.

A dramatization of the recent (1919-35) changes in Navajo Indian life.The Enemy Gods follows the general theme of Author La Farge’s previous Indian fiction: the poor results of trying to adapt Indians to white wavs. The variation this time is a more ambitious social and political background. On the literary side the novel’s chief failings appear at those points where the anthropologist, the sociologist and the novelist could not get together.

In September 1919 a scrawny, big-eyed Navajo moppet entered the mission boarding school—one of the few beginners whom the mission truck did not have to carry off like a stray dog. Deloused, cropped, outfitted with blue work shirt, overalls, Leavenworth-made clodhoppers, named Myron Begay to replace Ashin Tso-n Bigé, quartered in dismal, overcrowded barracks, fed on 11¢ a day, Myron nevertheless preferred this atmosphere to life with his stepfather. When his mother came to take him home for the summer, he refused to go, saying he was “going on the Jesus Trail and be just like a white man.” By the time Myron was 15 he was regarded by the kindly mission head, Mr. Butler, as one of the most promising “de-Navajoized” students in his memory.

Myron’s first backsliding occurred when he was transferred (following the first big shakeup, under Hoover, of the Indian Service bureaucracy) to a school attended by Apaches. When one day he saw an unrepentant backslider from the start getting the worst of it in a fight with Apache students. Myron jumped in, was both delighted and distressed to discover he liked righting. That summer he let his hair grow, found riding better fun than driving a car, gambling songs prettier than many a mission hymn, backslid in his thoughts about pretty 12-year-old Buckskin’s daughter, began to have his doubts about mission morality. In this tormented state he set off to unburden himself to Mr. Butler. Instead he unburdened himself to a strange Indian girl in an empty cabin during a cloudburst. Before the night was over Myron had backslid as far as he could go. But when he offered to marry her she said he was too mixed-up in his mind to make a husband. By the time she changed her tune. Myron had finally made peace with his Navajo gods, had finally renounced his mission-learned, mixed-up ways.