Anthropologists have long delighted use with the wise and colorful folk tales they transcribed from their Indian informants. The stories in this collection, mostly by young Indians are another matter altogether: these are white-educated Indians, bitterly aware that their culture is threatened with destruction, trying to bear witness through a non-Indian genre, the short story.

A few years ago a young professor, Kenneth Rosen, doing graduate work in the southwestern United States, came upon some stories, written by Indians, which prompted him to undertake a search for more. Over a two-year period he followed leads from town to town, pueblo to pueblo, finally managing to uncover a total of forty stories. From them he has culled the eighteen works contained in this volume. All reveal, to various degrees and in varying ways, the preoccupations of contemporary American Indians. Not surprisingly, many are infused with the bitterness of a people and a culture long repressed. Several deal with violence (two, quite coincidentally, relate to the killing, by Indians, of a white cop) and the effort to escape from the pervasive, and so often destructive, white influence and system. Some are nostalgic, without being sentimental. In most, the enduring strength of the Indian past, what the editor terms "the insistent drums of tradition," are very much in evidence, evoked as a kind of counterpoint to the repression and aimlessness that gave marked, and still mark today, the lives of so many American Indians.