The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Arrow-Maker, by Mary Austin

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Title: The Arrow-Maker
A Drama in Three Acts

Author: Mary Austin

Release Date: January 13, 2009 [EBook #27792]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE ARROW-MAKER

A Drama in Three Acts

BY
MARY AUSTIN

_Revised Edition_

AMS PRESS
NEW YORK

Reprinted from the edition of 1915, Boston
First AMS EDITION published 1969
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 70-90082

AMS PRESS, INC.
New York, N. Y. 10003

DEDICATED
IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT TO
H. C. H.
AS ONE WHO AMONG MANY PROTESTANTS
"MADE GOOD"

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

The greatest difficulty to be met in the writing of an Indian play is
the extensive misinformation about Indians. Any real aboriginal of my
acquaintance resembles his prototype in the public mind about as much
as he does the high-nosed, wooden sign of a tobacco store, the fact
being that, among the fifty-eight linguistic groups of American
aboriginals, customs, traits, and beliefs differ as greatly as among
Slavs and Sicilians. Their very speech appears not to be derived from
any common stock. All that they really have of likeness is an average
condition of primitiveness: they have traveled just so far toward an
understanding of the world they live in, and no farther. It is this
general limitation of knowledge which makes, in spite of the
multiplication of tribal customs, a common attitude of mind which
alone affords a basis of interpretation.

But before attempting to realize the working of Indian psychology,
you must first rid yourself of the notion that there is any real
difference between the tribes of men except the explanations. What
determines man's behavior in the presence of fever, thunder, and the
separations of death, is the nature of his guess at the causes of
these things. The issues of life do not vary so much with the
conditions of civilization