Cuna Indian Art by Clyde E. Keeler (review)

Reviews 149 Negroes, but this book makes it clear that the prejudice was far greater than I had thought. “After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854,” writes Mr. Berwanger, “the slavery extension question took precedence over every other problem in American political life.” We forget how powerful politics became, especially on the growing frontier; we need to be reminded that what we like to think of as humanitarian motives were really political motives. We learn from our popular literature that the frontier was conquered and settled by and for Anglo-Saxons. This book gives us historical evidence. The frontier was against slavery primarily because it was against the Negro. P h il ip D u r h a m , University of California, Los Angeles Cuna Indian Art. By Clyde E. Keeler. (Jericho, N.Y.: Exposition Press, 1969. 192 pages, color and black-and-white photographs, index, $15.00.) This is an unusual, authoritative, and delightful book. Dr. Keeler is medical geneticist at the Georgia Central State Hospital, Milledgeville, Georgia. Since 1950 he has made seventeen scientific expedi­ tions to study the Cuna Indians on the San Bias islands off the Caribbean shore of eastern Panama. His first visit was to study the albinism of the Cuna Moon Children. This summer he is again in the islands studying arth­ ritis among the albinos and the dream-producing nature of cocoa bean incense used by Cuna clairvoyants. As a result of his intimate knowledge of these little-known people, he has written extensively on the beliefs of the Cunas in such books as Secrets of the Cuna Earthmother and Apples of Immortality from the Cuna Tree of Life. His pertinent letters to this reviewer over the last few years further attest the wide range of his interest in their culture. His present book is an outgrowth of these extensive studies. “I have always been fascinated by primitive Cuna art”, he says. “I watched it in production, classified it, and pried into its symbolic meanings.” A number of rare pieces from his collection, as pictured here, are being shown through July, August, and September at the Field Museum, Chicago in the most com­ plete exhibition of Cuna art to be put on display. The book is divided into two parts. Religious Arts include body and face painting, ceremonial canes, idols of many kinds, the soul boat and sepulcher, spirit ladders, pictographs, and allegorical pictures. Secular art includes the famous Mola blouse, weaving, beadwork, figurines, jewelry, and healing stones. 150 Western American Literature Inexhaustible as these categories seem, and brief as is this book, Cuna art emerges here in all its richness of color, composition, and imaginative symbolism. The text is thin. Dr. Keeler lets his full-color plates and blackand white photographs speak for themselves. How can one describe the Palewalla Tree of Life (the umbilical cord), the Earthmother giving birth to her prophets, an excursion on the Sunboat of Heaven? What modern designs there are too: of Adam and Eve being driven from the Garden of Eden, of a table set with Gorham silver abstracted from an advertisement in the Ladies Home Journal, a classical design of a French telephone done by a weaver who believed the dial to be a hunched-up rabbit! The now famous appliqued mola blouses—“cloth of the grandmothers”, and a “monument to patience”—are being sold in the fashionable shops of New York. The idols, carved ceremonial canes, pictographs, and face and body painting designs are practically unknown. But all compose a body of superlative art pictured here in profusion. Unfortunately, says Dr. Keeler, “The avenues for expression of native art among the Cunas are rapidly closing as acculturation from the Western world takes place, and all artistic outlets associated with the native Cuna religion will disappear when Christianity supplants it.” Many beliefs and ceremonies already have disappeared and taken with them the associated art. This disintegration and disappearance of a distinctive Indian art almost before it has become known accentuates the value and timeliness of this delightful book. F r a n k W a ters, Taos, New Mexico Wild Sports in the Far West. By Friedrich Gerstacker. 1854 English transla­ tion...