I'm shocked that Glenn would pass up an enchanting experience with the Necronomicon just because the host has a minor skin blemish. If you don't blithely ignore portents of terror you aren't in a Lovecraft story. Also don't accept any party invitations from Lovecraft.
I don't think that the narrator's people are supposed to be what we would consider Native Americans. They are supposed to be a much older group. That's why 3 of them were hung as witches by the Puritans. I thought the winter setting was an interesting start for a weird story and I like the tie in to older Christmas rituals. It was a clunky transition though.
Haha, yeah. I've made worse choices in order to look at a rare book before, so I guess that was hypocritical of me.
I think you are probably right that these people aren't Native Americans, either, but some other human group that predates them. I was very tempted to go see what people thought about when (and how) Native Americans had reached the Americas back in the 1920s, but I just didn't have time to do it. It will come again though (Lovecraft will mention Piltdown Man, for example), so it's on my list of extra reading to do when I have time. But I guess that Lovecraft must have been thinking that these people in Kingsport are the descendants of some other trans-Atlantic civilization that predates the arrival of Indo-Europeans into Europe.
Definitely a clunky transition, but I still really enjoyed all the imagery of this story, and, strangely, it did put me in the Christmas spirit.