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420
the eighth, from "Our Ute Indians," by Mrs. W.G. King, The Colorado
Magazine,
April 1960, 128.
I have sometimes transferred to the White River country experiences
that took place elsewhere in the region but could very well have happened
there. Regarding Mrs. King's account of the whereabouts of Ouray's
bones, I suppose I should add that, for all its defi niteness, this version
is, alas, only one of several in a controversy that went on for some time.
The lyric by the anonymous Ute on page 334 (`A Ute, unidentifi ed') is
made out of a prose statement by an unnamed Ute quoted on page 119 of
"The Southern Ute of Colorado," by Marvin K. Opler, in Acculturation in
Seven American Indian Tribes,
Ralph Linton, editor, D. Appleton- Century
Co., 1940. Meeker's subsequent reference to Heraclitus was suggested by
one of Opler's comments on the statement by the Ute.
The lines which serve as the epigraph to Book Three form the fourth
stanza of Hugh MacDiarmid's `Prayer for a Second Flood,' in A Lap of
Honour,
published by The Swallow Press.
Certain further acknowledgments -- of sources for particular passages
or phrases -- are made in footnotes at appropriate points in the text itself.
Book One and the Prologue to Book Two appeared fi rst in a consider-
ably diff erent version in The Denver Quarterly, Summer 1971.
A selection from `A Bundle of Colorow's Things' appeared in Spec-
trum, Spring 1975.
a note on piah
Piah in his regalia is a man of action, and not to be associated with es-
thetes like those young men of a tribe near the center of the Sudan who,
E.H. Gombrich reports, `spend a good deal of their time decorating their
own and each other's bodies with colored earth, renewing or changing
the elaborate designs as soon as they get smudged. Here as elsewhere it
is the women who do the work....' (Gombrich quotes a solemn and sin-
ister Marxist opinion of the young men's occupation: `It is probably not
in the national interest of new socialist states that art traditions such as
these survive.')