Karl Kroeber is a distinguished professor of English at
Columbia University and the son of a distinguished anthropologist,
Alfred Louis Kroeber. He has been listening to Native American
stories since his boyhood, and writing about them (side
by side with his work on the English Romantics) for roughly
twenty years. An anthology he edited in 1981, Traditional
American Indian literatures: Texts and interpretations,
taught me much when it appeared, and a statement Kroeber
made in the introduction to that volume has stayed with
me ever since. “It is our scholarship,” he
wrote, “not Indian literature, which is primitive
or underdeveloped.”