“Indian Talk on Erosion Win Prize for Oklahoman.” The Coolidge (AZ) Examiner, 21 March 1941, p. 2. “Both pictures show white man
crazy.”
The writer of the winning contest entry, O. E.
Enfield, was a county attorney in Arnett, Oklahoma. I don’t know his ethnicity.
Some later iterations state the writer was “an Indian boy,” “a bright Indian
lad,” “a Cherokee Indian,” or “an Oklahoma Indian, descended from a North
Georgia Cherokee,” but the use of stereotypical “Injun English” marks it as inauthentic.
The contest entry, sometimes incorrectly reported as having been written in the
1950s or 1960s, expresses an ecological message which has led to it being
quoted in a few books on landscaping, e.g., George Tobey, A History of Landscape Architecture: The Relationship of People to
Environment (1973); John L. Motloch, Introduction
to Landscape Design, 2nd ed. (2001); and James D. Kornwolf, Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial
North America, vol. 3 (2002).
Russ Pancoast, “Your Wildlife Reporter” (column
excerpt). The Cuero (TX) Record, 8 August 1954, p. 2. “Recently a
deserted farm house in a gullied field was pictured in a farm journal which
offered a prize for the best 100-word description. An Indian took the prize
with this: ‘Picture shows white man crazy.’”
“An Indian Idea.” The
Annals of Iowa 33 (1955), 145.
The Chicago Seed, vol. 4, no. 6, Sep. 1969, p. 17.
Joseph Epes Brown, Teaching
Spirits: Understanding Native American Religious Traditions (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 101.
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