THE SPIRIT OF NATIVE AMERICA Beauty and Mysticism in American Indian Art <i> by Anna Lee Walters (Chronicle Books: $16.95; 120 pp.) </i>

These essays and color photographs of clothing, housing, weapons and icons are especially striking because they show how traditional Indian culture has done away with the dualisms that rock Western culture: Dualisms between art (what Westerners believe they see in a museum or theater) and life (the daily routine); dreams (diverting reveries) and wakefulness (“reality”); nature (that which is outside of us) and culture (that which we create). In traditional Native America, Anna Walters shows, dreams offer direction in life, culture emerges from nature (which is both inside and around us) and art and life are intertwined.

An example of the latter is suggested in a photograph of Indian sheaths for rifles which had been inherited from Western settlers. Transforming the merely efficient objects into cultural artifacts, the sheaths were richly painted to reflect nature’s harmony and tapered into long, thin strands of hide at the rifle’s end to suggest the source of the object’s destructive power. This crystallizing of invisible forces is the principle purpose behind all of the art portrayed in these pages. As one “artist-spirit” fictionalized by Walters recounts, “When I was a young child, I already knew there were playful spirits in the wind, in the lizard sitting motionlessly on my hand. . . . I felt there was something that was unseen in me, but nevertheless was the link to everything else here.”

Walters’ “spirit-voices” sometimes grow tiresome, breathlessly intoning the same message about spiritual omnipresence (“The nations live! My spirit lives! The spiritual world is everywhere!”), but more often they convey a message reassuring to those concerned about the ephemerality of life. “Having been born into the (Indian) nations,” one voice says, “I know with profound certainty that infinite life is beauty.”