The American Indian, 1926-1931

Long before it became the “thing to do,” the questions of self-image and pride in this image and what to do about them were the subjects, consciously or unconsciously, of a magazine which was born in the mid-1920s in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and suffered a premature death in the early 1930s. Mr. Lee F. Harkins, its founding editor, was of Chickasaw—Choctaw heritage and, by virtue of birth, qualified to speak of and for the Indian. The other qualifications that made him so very right for this task were his apparent extraordinary sense of presence, his sense of history, and his sense of the role of the American Indian in that history. With a burning ambition he set out to put both history and imagery into a proper perspective by publishing The American Indian magazine. After the realization that only two complete sets were known to exist and that the several issues printed on an inferior quality paper were turning brown and crumbling, the campaign for a reprint edition was quickly successful since the magazine’s value as a real historical piece is obvious even at first glance.