Constance Lindsay Skinner is known in Canadian literary history as a minor author of the early twentieth century who wrote adaptations of authentic West Coast Indian songs. But this reputation is misleading, for her "adaptations" are often original free-verse and imagist poems. In addition Skinner was a prolific playwright, novelist, essayist, journalist, critic, and social historian. Although she spent her adult life writing and publishing in the United States, much of her creative work is set in western Canada; it is informed by her childhood experience and her extensive knowledge of Canadian history and native Indian culture. Her work is therefore of Canadian historical interest. Skinner's poems and novels have a wider historical appeal, as well, because of their depiction of twentieth-century female experience and feminist concerns.

Skinner's interest in North American Indian culture is not surprising. She was born in 1877 to Robert and Annie Lindsay Skinner and...