Page 5 As an adult of considerable cultural refinement and social polish, Joseph Campbell himself seemed amused by how much he identified with the rustic visionaries and antlered shamans of the "primitive," preliterate world. There was never any doubt that he preferred the little Indian to General Crook. A deeply felt connection with nature and psyche was pitted against collective patterns of thought and behavior; the Paleolithic versus the Neolithic worldviews; the hunters versus the planters, the shamans versus the priests of orthodoxy. These value conflicts would become lifelong elements of his personal mythscape. Why, he asked, contemplating a culture with such obvious identity problems, should we remain rootless, when voices and visions since time out of mind beckon us to find our place in a timeless human community? Campbell felt that by bringing ancient myths recurrently to the attention of the literate community, he was giving these root metaphors a voice--explaining why they, too, must contribute not only to our world, but to the shaping of our worldview. His vision began, as we have seen, with an ear close to the soil of his native land, and to the end of his life he was highly conscious, and mostly proud, of being an American. Could we draw some nobility and some human wisdom, he wondered, from our own tragically conquered and subjected native population?.