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THE INDIAN LANGUAGES
AUGUSTA STRONG
THIS RECENTIY[[typo of "I" instead of "L"?]] reissued volume,* containing two early and basic studies of Indians and their languages in American, is a welcome addition to the bookshelves of all those who are seriously concerned with combatting racism in all its phases in this country. For the Indian peoples of Americas, by and large have been subjected to the same cultural denigration as the African minority. In the United Sates, perhaps even to a greater degree than with the blacks, their historic role has been forgotten, denied, suppressed, falsified-to be replaced by the fantastic image, long fostered in the average mind, of a race of vengeful, uneducable, shiftless savages. And far too few of those who are in freedom struggle have so much as a nodding acquaintance with the background and history of our Indian brothers. Both of these works, now reprinted, are a valuable beginning toward a better understanding.
Boas's Introduction to Handbook of American Indian Languages (1911) is one of the classic documents of American scholarship-a landmark in modern linguistic studies and a pioneering paper in American anthropology as well. It is significant that Boas and the two great contemporary scholars who followed his lead as linguists and anthropologists, Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield, further developed studies of the North American Indians and their cultures.
Serious study of American Indian cultural life did not begin until the Nineteenth Century, and when the time came to record some of the languages, three centuries after the first European contacts, many tribes had been displaced and scattered, and much important evidence had disappeared. Among the founders of the Republic, Thomas Jefferson was one of the minority who advocated work among the Indians. Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury under Jeferson, an advanced political thinker in his day, became the founder of the American Ethnological Society, and in 1836 undertook the first major
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*INTRODUCTION TO HANDBOOK OF AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES. By Franz Boas; INDIAN LINGUISTIC FAMILIES OF AMERICA NORTH OF MEXCIO. By J.W. Powell. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. 211 pages. $1.85.
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