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WHAT THE WHITE RACE MAY
LEARN FROM THE INDIAN
BOOKS BY GEORGE WHARTON JAMES
What the White Race May Learn from the Indian.
In and Around the Grand Canyon.
Indians of the Painted Desert Region.
In and Out of the Old Missions of California.
The Wonders of the Colorado Desert.
The Story of Scraggles.
Indian Basketry.
How to Make Indian and Other Baskets.
Travelers’ Handbook to Southern California.
The Beacon Light.
[Illustration: GROUP OF HOPI MAIDENS AND AN OLD MAN AT MASHONGANAVI.]
What the White Race May
Learn from the Indian
BY
GEORGE WHARTON JAMES
AUTHOR OF “IN AND AROUND THE GRAND CANYON,” “INDIAN BASKETRY,” “HOW
TO MAKE INDIAN AND OTHER BASKETS,” “PRACTICAL BASKET MAKING,”
“THE INDIANS OF THE PAINTED DESERT REGION,” “TRAVELERS’ HANDBOOK
TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA,” “IN AND OUT OF THE OLD
MISSIONS OF CALIFORNIA,” “THE STORY OF SCRAGGLES,”
“THE WONDERS OF THE COLORADO DESERT,” “THROUGH
RAMONA’S COUNTRY,” “LIVING THE RADIANT
LIFE,” “THE BEACON LIGHT,” ETC.
[Illustration]
CHICAGO
FORBES & COMPANY
1908
COPYRIGHT, 1908
BY
EDITH E. FARNSWORTH
The Lakeside Press
R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY
CHICAGO
[Illustration: WHAT THE WHITE RACE MAY LEARN FROM THE INDIAN]
FOREWORD
I would not have it thought that I commend indiscriminately everything
that the Indian does and is. There are scores of things about the
Indian that are reprehensible and to be avoided. Most Indians smoke,
and to me the habit is a vile and nauseating one. Indians often wear
filthy clothes. They are often coarse in their acts, words, and their
humor. Some of their habits are repulsive. I have seen Indian boys
and men maltreat helpless animals until my blood has boiled with an
indignation I could not suppress, and I have taken the animals away
from them. They are generally vindictive and relentless in pursuit of
their enemies. They often content themselves with impure and filthy
water when a little careful labor would give them a supply of fairly
good water.
Indeed, in numerous things and ways I have personally seen the Indian
is not to be commended, but condemned, and his methods of life avoided.
But because of this, I do not close my eyes to the many good things
of his life. My reason is useless to me unless it teaches me what to
accept and what to reject, and he is kin to fool who refuses to accept
good from a man or a race unless in everything that man or race is
perfect. There is no perfection, in man at least, on earth, and all the
good I have ever received from human beings has been from imperfect men
and women. So I fully recognize the imperfections of the Indian while
taking lessons from him in those things that go to make life fuller,
richer, better.
Neither must it be thought that everything here said of the Indians
with whom I have come in contact can be said of all Indians. Indians
are not all alike any more than white men and women are all alike. One
can find filthy, disgusting slovens among white women, yet we do not
condemn all white women on the strength of this indisputable fact. So
with Indians. Some are good, some indifferent, some bad. In dealing
with them as a race, a people, therefore, I do as I would with my own
race, I take what to me seem to be racial characteristics, or in other
words, the things that are manifested in the lives of the best men and
women, and which seem to represent their habitual aims, ambitions, and
desires.
This book lays no claim to completeness or thoroughness. It is merely
suggestive. The field is much larger than I have gleaned over. The
chapters of which the book is composed were written when away from
works of reference, and merely as transcripts of the remembrances
that flashed through my mind at the time of writing. Yet I believe in
everything I have said I have kept strictly within the bounds of truth,
and have written only that which I personally know to be fact.
The original articles from which these pages have been made were
written in various desultory places,--on the cars, while traveling
between the Pacific and the Atlantic, on the elevated railways of the
metropolis, standing at the desk of my New York friend in his office on
Broadway, even in the woods of Michigan and in the depths of the Grand
Canyon. Two of the new chapters were written at the home of my friend
Bass, at Bass Camp, Grand Canyon, but the main enlargement and revision
has occurred at Santa Clara College, the site of the Eighth Mission
in the Alta California chain of Franciscan Missions. The bells of the
Mission Church have hourly rung in my ears, and the Angelus and other
calls to prayer have given me sweet memories of the good old padres
who founded this and the other missions, as well as shown me pictures
of the devoted priests of to-day engaged in their solemn services. I
have heard the merry shouts of the boys of this college at their play,
for the Jesuits are the educators of the boys of the Catholic Church.
Here from the precincts of this old mission, I call upon the white race
to incorporate into its civilization the good things of the Indian
civilization; to forsake the injurious things of its pseudo-civilized,
artificial, and over-refined life, and to return to the simple,
healthful, and natural life which the Indians largely lived before and
after they came under the dominion of the Spanish padres.
If all or anything of that which is here presented leads any of my
readers to a kinder and more honest attitude of mind towards the
Indians, then I shall be thankful, and the book will have amply
accomplished its mission.
GEORGE WHARTON JAMES.
SANTA CLARA, CALIFORNIA, November 27, 1907.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
FOREWORD 9
I. THE WHITE RACE AND ITS TREATMENT OF THE INDIAN 15
II. THE WHITE RACE AND ITS CIVILIZATION 28
III. THE INDIAN AND NASAL AND DEEP BREATHING 39
IV. THE INDIAN AND OUT-OF-DOOR LIFE 49
V. THE INDIAN AND SLEEPING OUT OF DOORS 70
VI. THE INDIAN AS A WALKER, RIDER, AND CLIMBER 79
VII. THE INDIAN IN THE RAIN AND THE DIRT 93
VIII. THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR 105
IX. THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN 111
X. THE INDIAN AND DIET 119
XI. THE INDIAN AND EDUCATION 130
XII. THE INDIAN AND HOSPITALITY 143
XIII. THE INDIAN AND CERTAIN SOCIAL TRAITS AND CUSTOMS 156
XIV. THE INDIAN AND SOME LUXURIES 162
XV. THE INDIAN AND THE SEX QUESTION 175
XVI. THE INDIAN AND HER BABY 183
XVII. THE INDIAN AND THE SANCTITY OF NUDITY 197
XVIII. THE INDIAN AND FRANKNESS 204
XIX. THE INDIAN AND REPINING 207
XX. THE INDIAN AND THE SUPERFLUITIES OF LIFE 210
XXI. THE INDIAN AND MENTAL POISE 217
XXII. THE INDIAN AND SELF-RESTRAINT 229
XXIII. THE INDIAN AND AFFECTATION 235
XXIV. THE INDIAN AND ART WORK 240
XXV. THE INDIAN AND RELIGIOUS WORSHIP 250
XXVI. THE INDIAN AND IMMORTALITY 259
XXVII. VISITING THE INDIANS 265
XXVIII. CONCLUSION 268
CHAPTER I
THE WHITE RACE AND ITS TREATMENT OF THE INDIAN
Ever since the white race has been in power on the American continent
it has regarded the Indian race--and by this I mean all the aboriginal
people found here--as its inferiors in every regard. And little by
little upon this hypothesis have grown up various sentiments and
aphorisms which have so controlled the actions of men who never see
below the surface of things, and who have no thought power of their
own, that our national literature has become impregnated with the
fiendish conception that “the only good Indian is the dead Indian.”
The exploits of a certain class of scouts and Indian-hunters have been
lauded in books without number, so that even schoolboys are found each
year running away west, each with a belt of cartridges around his waist
and a revolver in his hip pocket, for the purpose of _hunting Indians_.
Good men and women, people of the highest character, are found to be
possessed of an antipathy towards the Indian that is neither moral nor
christian. Men of the highest integrity in ordinary affairs will argue
forcefully and with an apparent confidence in the justice of their plea
that the Indian has no rights in this country that we are bound to
respect. They are here merely on sufferance, and whatever the United
States government does for them is pure and disinterested philanthropy,
for which the Indian should be only grateful and humble.
To me this is a damnable state of affairs. If prior possession entitles
one to any right in land, then the Indian owns the land of the United
States by prior right. The so-called argument that because the Indian
is not wisely _using_ the land, and that therefore he stands in the
way of progress and must be removed, and further, that we, the people
of the United States, are the providentially appointed instruments for
that removal, is to me so sophistical, so manifestly insincere, so
horribly cruel, that I have little patience either to listen or reply
to it.
If this be true, what about the vast holders of land whom our laws
cherish and protect? Are they holding the land for useful and good
purposes? Are they “helping on the cause of civilization” by their
merciless and grasping control of the millions of acres they have
generally so unlawfully and immorally secured? Thousands, nay millions,
of acres are held by comparatively few men, without one thought for the
common good. The only idea in the minds of these men is the selfish
one: “What can I make out of it?”
Let us be honest with ourselves and call things by their proper names
in our treatment of the weaker race. If the Indian is in the way and
we are determined to take his land from him, let us at least be manly
enough to recognize ourselves as thieves and robbers, and do the act as
the old barons of Europe used to do it, by force of arms, fairly and
cheerfully: “You have these broad acres: I want them. I challenge you
to hold them: to the victor belongs the spoils.” Then the joust began.
And he who was the stronger gained the acres and the castle.
Let us go to the Indian and say: “I want your lands, your
hunting-grounds, your forests, your water-holes, your springs, your
rivers, your corn-fields, your mountains, your canyons. I need them for
my own use. I am stronger than you; there are more of us than there are
of you. I’ve got to have them. You will have to do with less. I’m going
to take them;” and then proceed to the robbery. But let us be above the
contemptible meanness of calling our theft “benevolent assimilation,”
or “manifest destiny,” or “seeking the higher good of the Indian.” A
nation as well as a race may do scoundrel acts, but let it not add
to its other evil the contemptible crime of conscious hypocrisy. The
unconscious hypocrite is to be pitied as well as shaken out of his
hypocrisy, but the conscious hypocrite is a stench in the nostrils of
all honest men and women. The major part of the common people of the
United States have been unconscious of the hypocritical treatment that
has been accorded the Indians by their leaders, whether these leaders
were elected or appointed officials or self-elected philanthropists and
reformers. Hence, while I would “shake them up” and make them conscious
of their share in the nation’s hypocrisy, I have no feeling of
condemnation for them. On the other hand, I feel towards the conscious
humbugs and hypocrites, who use the Indian as a cloak for their own
selfish aggrandizement and advancement, as the Lord is said to have
felt toward the lukewarm churches when He exclaimed: “I will spew thee
out of my mouth.”
In our treatment of the Indian we have been liars, thieves, corrupters
of the morals of their women, debauchers of their maidens, degraders
of their young manhood, perjurers, and murderers. We have lied to
them about our good, pacific, and honorable intentions; we have made
promises to them that we never intended to keep--made them simply to
gain our own selfish and mercenary ends in the easiest possible way,
and then have repudiated our promises without conscience and without
remorse. We have stolen from them nearly all they had of lands and
worldly possessions. Only two or three years ago I was present when a
Havasupai Indian was arrested for having shot a deer out of season,
taken before the courts and heavily fined, when his own father had
roamed over the region hunting, as his ancestors had done for centuries
before, ere there were any white men’s laws or courts forbidding them
to do what was as natural for them to do as it was to drink of the
water they found, eat of the fruits and berries they passed, or breathe
the air as they rode along. The law of the white man in reference to
deer and antelope hunting is based upon the selfishness of the white
man, who in a few generations has slain every buffalo, most of the
mountain sheep, elk, moose, and left but a comparative remnant of deer
and antelope. The Indian has never needed such laws. He has always been
unselfish enough to leave a sufficient number of this wild game for
breeding purposes, or, if it was not unselfishness that commanded his
restraint, his own self-interest in piling up meat was sacrificed to
the general good of his people who required meat also, and must be able
to secure it each year. Hence, to-day we shut off by law the normal and
natural source of meat supply of the Indian, without any consultation
with him, and absolutely without recourse or redress, because we
ourselves--the white race--are so unmitigatedly selfish, so mercenary,
so indifferent to the future needs of the race, that without such law
we would kill off all the wild game in a few short years.
[Illustration: A WALLAPAI BASKET WEAVER.]
Then who is there who has studied the Indian and the white man’s
relation to him, who does not know of the vile treatment the married
women and maidens alike have received at the hands of the “superior”
people. Let the story of the devilish debaucheries of young Indian
girls by Indian agents and teachers be fully written, and even the most
violent defamers of Indians would be compelled to hang their heads with
shame. To those who know, the name of Perris--a southern California
Indian school--brings up memories of this class of crime that make
one’s blood hot against the white fiend who perpetrated them, and I am
now as I write near to the Havasupai reservation in northern Arizona,
where one of the teachers had to leave surreptitiously because of his
discovered immoralities with Indian women and girls. Only a decade ago
the name of the Wallapai woman was almost synonymous with immorality
because of the degrading influences of white men, and one of the most
pathetic things I ever heard was the hopeless “What can we do about
it?” of an Indian chief on the Colorado desert, when I spoke to him of
the demoralization of the women of his people. In effect his reply was:
“The whites have so driven us to the wall that we are often hungry, and
it is far easier to be immoral than to go hungry.”
Then, read the reports of the various Indian agents throughout the
country who have sought to enforce the laws against whites selling
liquor to Indians. Officials and courts alike have often been supine
and indifferent to the Indian’s welfare, and have generally shown
far more desire to protect the white man in his “vested interests”
than to protect the young men of the Indian tribes against the evil
influences of liquor. Again and again I have been in Indian councils
and heard the old men declaim against the white man’s fire-water. The
Havasupais declare it to be _han-a-to-op-o-gi_, “very bad,” the Navahos
_da-shon-de_, “of the Evil One,” while one and all insist that their
young men shall be kept from its demoralizing influence. Yet there is
seldom a _fiesta_ at which some vile white wretch is not willing to
sell his own soul, and violate the laws of whites and Indians alike,
in order to gain a little dirty pelf by providing some abominable
decoction which he sells as whisky to those whose moral stamina is not
strong enough to withstand the temptation.
[Illustration: A SKILLED HOPI BASKET WEAVER.]
And as for perjury in our dealings with Indians: read the records of
broken treaties, violated pledges, and disregarded vows noted by Helen
Hunt Jackson in her “Century of Dishonor,” and then say whether the
charge is not sustained.
Yet, when the Indian has dared to resent the cruel and abominable
treatment accorded to him in so many instances and in such fearful
variety, he has been called “treacherous, vindictive, fiendish,
murderous,” because, in his just and righteous indignation and wrath,
he has risen and determined to slay all he could find of the hated
white race. No doubt his warfare has not always been civilized. Why
should it be? How could it be? He is not civilized. He knows nothing of
“christian” principles in a war which “christian” people have forced
upon him as an act of self-defense. He is a savage, battling with
savage ferocity, savage determination, to keep his home, that of his
ancestors, for himself, his children, and their children. Oom Paul
Kruger told the British that if they forced a war upon the Boers for
the possession of the Transvaal, they would win it at a price that
would “stagger humanity.” Yet thousands of good Americans honored Oom
Paul for his “bravery,” his “patriotism,” his “god-like determination
to stand for the rights of his people.” But if our Indian does the same
thing in the defense of his home and slaughters a lot of soldiers sent
to drive him away, he is guilty of murderous treachery; his killings
are “massacres,” and he must be exterminated as speedily as possible.
Who ever hears any other than the term “massacre” applied to the death
of Custer and his soldiers? The “Custer massacre” is as “familiar
as household words.” Yet what is a massacre? Webster says: “1. The
killing of a considerable number of human beings under circumstances
of atrocity or cruelty, or contrary to the usages of civilized people.
2. Murder.” With such definitions in view, look at the facts of the
case. I would not have it understood in what I say that I am condemning
Custer. He was a general under orders, and as a dutiful servant he
was endeavoring to carry them out. (The debatable question as to
whether he was obeying or disregarding orders I leave for military men
themselves to settle.) It is not Custer, or any other one individual,
that I am condemning, but the public, national policy. Custer’s army
was ordered to proceed against these men, and forcibly remove them from
the place they had chosen as their home--and which had been theirs
for centuries before a white man ever trod this continent--and take
them to a reservation which they disliked, and in the choice of which
their wishes, desires, or comfort had in no way been consulted. The
white soldiers were armed, and it is well known that they intended to
use these arms. Could they have come upon the Indians by stealth, or
by some stratagem, they would have done so without any compunctions
of conscience, and no one would ever have thought of administering a
rebuke to them, even though in the fight that would undoubtedly have
ensued every Indian had been slain. It would have been heralded as a
glorious victory, and we should have thanked God for His goodness in
directing our soldiers in their “honorable” warfare. But unfortunately,
the incident turned in another direction. The would-be captors were
the caught; the would-be surprisers were the surprised; the would-be
slayers were the slain. Custer and his band of men, brave and gallant
as United States soldiers generally are,--and I would resent with heat
any slanderous remark to the contrary,--were surrounded, surprised, and
slain to a man.
[Illustration: INDIAN BEADWORK OF INTERESTING DESIGN.]
Weep at the grave of Custer; weep at the graves of his men; weep
with the widows and orphans of those suddenly surprised and slain
soldiers. My own tears have fallen many a time as I have read and
reread the details of that awful tragedy; but still, in the weeping
do not be dishonest and ungenerous to the victors,--Indians though
they were. Upon the testimony of no less an authority than General
Charles King, who has known the Sioux personally and intimately for
years, they were ever the hospitable friends of the white race, until
a post commander,--whose name should be pilloried for the execration
of the nation,--imbued with the idea that the only good Indian was the
dead Indian, betrayed and slew in cold blood a number of them who had
trusted to his promises and placed themselves in his hands. The result
was, that the whole tribe took this slaughter to their own hearts, as
any true patriots would have done, and from that day to this the major
part of the Sioux have hated the white race with the undying, bitter
hatred of the vindictive savage.
Again and again when I have visited Indian schools the thoughtful
youths and maidens have come to me with complaints about the American
history they were compelled to study. In their simple, almost colorless
way of expressing themselves, a bystander would never dream of the
fierce anger that was raging within, but which I was too experienced
in Indian character not to perceive. Listen to what some of them
have said: “When we read in the United States history of white men
fighting to defend their families, their homes, their corn-fields,
their towns, and their hunting-grounds, they are always called
‘patriots,’ and the children are urged to follow the example of these
brave, noble, and gallant men. But when Indians--our ancestors, even
our own parents--have fought to defend us and our homes, corn-fields,
and hunting-grounds they are called vindictive and merciless savages,
bloody murderers, and everything else that is vile. You are the
Indians’ friend: will you not some time please write for us a United
States history that will not teach us such wicked and cruel falsehoods
about our forefathers because they loved their homes enough to fight
for them--even against such powerful foes as you have been.” And I have
vowed that if ever I have time and strength and feel competent to do
it, I will write such a history.
[Illustration: INDIAN BEADWORK.]
Yet this is by no means all the charge I have to make against my
own race in its treatment of the Indian. Not content with depriving
him of his worldly possessions, we have added insult to injury, and
administered a far deeper and more cutting wound to him by denying to
him and his wives and daughters the moral, poetical, and spiritual
qualities they possess. To many of the superior (!) race this is
utter nonsense. The idea that an Indian has any feelings to be hurt!
How ridiculous! Yet I make the assertion, fearless of successful
contradiction, that many Indians feel more keenly this ignoring of the
good, the poetic, the æsthetic, the religious or spiritual qualities
they possess than they do the physical wrongs that have been inflicted
upon them. As a race, we are prejudiced, bigoted, and “big-headed” when
looking upon any other race. We come by our prejudices naturally. The
Englishman looks down upon the “frog-eating Frenchman,” and used to say
he could lick ten or a dozen such. The Frenchman and Englishman both
scoff at the beer-drinking German and the stolid Dutchman, yet France
has to remember Sedan, and England still smarts at the name of Van
Tromp. The fact is that no nation can afford to look down upon another,
any more than any civilization can afford to crow over another. Each
has its own virtues, its own “goods,” its own advantages. France,
England, Germany, America, have never equaled, much less surpassed,
the architecture of Greece, Egypt, and Rome. The United States, with
all its brag and boast, has never had a poet equal to old blind Homer
or the Italian Dante. Germany’s Goethe is worthy to stand side by
side with England’s Shakspere, and the architecture of the rude and
vulgar “Goths” is the supremest crown of all building in the proud and
conceited English-speaking “Mother Country.”
And so have I learned to look at the Indian. He has many things that
we can take to our advantage and profit, and some of these have been
presented in the following pages. In the next chapter I have a few
necessary reservations and observations to make which I trust the
patience of the reader will permit him carefully to consider.