INDIAN CHIEF

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 923, 18 April 1957, Page 13

INDIAN CHIEF

LONG LANCE: The Autobiography of Blackfoot Indian Chief, Chief Buffalo Fong Lance; Faber and Faber, English price /6. V ITHOUT the introduction by Irvin S. Cobb this book would arouse suspicions. I accept Mr Cobb’s assurance that it is "authentic history," but I do not accept it easily. My difficulty is to believe that everything I read about Indians when I was a boy was true, Fennimore Cooper could have drawn this portrait if there had been an Indian in his day who had attended a university, been offered (and refused) an appointment to West Point, and having enlisted as a private in the Canadian forces returned from a World War as a captain of volunteers, "his body covered with wounds and his breast glittering with medals." If such a man had existed in Cooper’s day, this is the kind of picture he might have drawn of the boy that became that man: of his early training and hardship; his initiation as a watrior; his hunts, battles and raids; his contacts with missionaries; the dawning of the new day. It is all interesting, and some of it is exciting. But if it comes from the pen of dan Indian who was well advanced in years before he "mastered the white man’s learning," who was, and is, a chief, and who can still point to medicine men "possessed of powers which no one has ever been able to explain," the journey from the old day to the new has been brief, rapid, and

dramatic.

O.

D.