This volume is a handy research tool for anyone interested in Native American culture or in the changing perceptions of Native American culture as reflected in the 70-odd years of the Saturday Evening Post. Researchers can now access in one volume information that was previously scattered throughout 161 rolls of microfilm. Significantly, the authors do more than simply list references to Native Americans and Eskimos in the magazine; they provide extensive summaries of many of the writings, and in a number of important articles, they have quoted excerpts so that we can read the originals. Also included are reproductions of the images and illustrations from the magazine.
Everyone who knew the Saturday Evening Post in its heyday knew it as the most popular and influential American magazine during much of the twentieth century. Full of fiction, nonfiction, art, cartoons, poetry, humor, travel, and more, it found its way into more American households and libraries than any of its competitors. In the era before television, the Saturday Evening Post was a must-read for anyone who wanted to know what was going on around the country or who simply wanted to be entertained.
Scholars have always known this magazine to be a storehouse of information about American Indians as reflected in American popular culture, but there was, before now, no easy way to gain access to that storehouse.
The ideas and attitudes expressed in the art work—photographs and cartoons, and in the articles—fiction, editorial comment, and letters to the editors, give us an accurate representation of the beliefs of Americans during the first half of this century. As a window to popular perception of American Indians and Eskimos, the 70 years of the magazine are invaluable, and now, for the first time, researchers have a guide to that literature.
