The Living Test Tube

MAN'S RISE TO CIVILIZATION AS SHOWN BY THE INDIANS OF NORTH AMERICA FROM PRIMEVAL TIMES TO THE COMING OF THE INDUSTRIAL STATE by Peter Farb. 332 pages. Duffon. $8.95.

Was the North American Indian a noble red man or a bloodthirsty savage? Both and neither, is the inevitable answer provided in this fascinating though disorganized survey. Commuting between the Aztecs and the Eskimos, millennium-hopping from "primeval times to the coming of the industrial state," this book is as nomadic as its subject matter. Its author is a conservationist-archaeologist-anthropologist who divides his time between duties as consultant to the Smithsonian Institution and curator of American Indian cultures at New York's Riverside Museum.

He holds his many-stranded theme together half by a scientist's discipline, half by a moralist's passion.

Cruel Colonizinq. Scientist Farb sees the Indian as "a living test tube"—a "nearly ideal" controlled experiment in "the evolution of human customs and beliefs." Moralist Farb, blowing Scientist Farb's cool, views him as a victim of the brutal old art of colonizing. "The white," Farb writes in barely composed fury, "is an exploiter of human and natural resources; he has destroyed, often intentionally, almost every alien culture he has come in contact with."

Farb is at his best in disproving the stereotype of the Indian as a pure primitive. He concedes that the Indian's ancestors, who, he believes, crossed the

Bering Strait land bridge 10,000 to 25,000 years ago, comprised genetically "one of the most homogeneous populations on earth." But the Indian, he says, soon took on "the vastness and the variety of North America" itself.

This supposedly simple primitive evolved more than 500 distinct lan -guages, each with its own set of dialects. Great Lakes Indians, practicing what Farb calls "multiple-use conservation," utilized 275 species of plant for medicine, 130 for food, 27 for smoking. As for ceremonies, even the comparatively backward Shoshone would "make the court of Versailles or the Kremlin appear unusually permissive."

"No" Was "Yes." Outlining the evolving sophistication of Indian society —from family to tribe to chiefdom to state—Farb suggests that the Indian failed to survive not because he was too simple but because he was too complex. Among Northwest Coast Indians, for instance, the social pecking order was so exacting that instead of being arranged in classes, each individual had to have a separate ranking. Potlatch feasts took on nuances of snobbery rivaling a Truman Capote party. Among the Cheyenne, social life became so complicated that for sheer relief a club known as the "Contraries" was formed, whose members said "no" when they meant "yes," "left" when they meant "right," and, when summoned, promptly went in the opposite direction.