Lyrics of the Red Man

Massachusettes: Wa-Wan Press, 1903. First Edition (presumed; no prior editions or printings cited). Folio in tan wraps,14 pp: Good: mild soiling to covers; pages show light staining to fore-edge, else pictorials remain clean. Paperback.

Scarce, Musical score. A romanticized selection of Indigenous North American songs and chants, filtered through the early twentieth-century impulse to “translate” Native oral traditions into genteel English verse. Drawing on material from several tribes but smoothing away their linguistic and ceremonial specificity, the volume seeks to evoke a unified “Native spirit” through atmospheric renderings of nature, seasonal cycles, hunting, and reverence for ancestral powers. Its value now lies less in ethnographic fidelity than in illustrating how Euro-American literary culture appropriated Indigenous poetics while simultaneously preserving faint echoes of the originals’ imagery and cadence.