THE INDIAN AND DIET
A man is largely the result of what he eats. Indeed, many scientific
specialists now tell us that sex determination is largely the result
of the food eaten by the expectant mother, so that according to what
the mother eats the unborn child becomes--male or female. Ploss in
his well-known “_Ueber die das Geschlechtsverhältniss der Kinder
bedingenden Ursachen_,” Düsing in his painstaking “_Die Regulirung des
Geschlechtsverhältnisses bei der Vernehrung der Menschen, Miere und
Pflanzen_,” and Westermarck in the “History of Human Marriage,” prove
conclusively, from close study of actual experimentation, that the sex
of the child is largely fixed by the quantity and quality of nutrition
absorbed by the mother. Hence it is not too strong a statement that a
man is largely the result of his (or his mother’s) food.
At first sight it will appear foolish to many of my readers to go
to the Indian for ideas on diet, yet I think I can prove, more
conclusively than the learned scientists whose books I have named above
can prove their theories, that the Indian has many ideas on diet which
the white race can learn to its great advantage.
[Illustration: HAVASUPAI WOMAN MAKING BREAD IN THE OPEN AIR.]
In the first place, the normal aborigine, before he began to use the
white man’s foods, was perforce compelled to live on a comparatively
simple diet. His choice was limited, his cookery simple. Yet he lived
in perfect health and strength. With few articles of diet, and these
of the simplest character, prepared in the readiest and easiest ways,
he attained a vigor, a robustness, that puts to shame the strength
and power of civilized men. Why? The reasons are not far to seek. In
simplicity of food there is safety. We eat not only too much, but too
great variety, and every student of dietetics knows that the greater
the variety the greater the possibility that too much will be eaten.
The Indian, living his simple life, was compelled to be content with
the maize, beans, pumpkins, and melons of his fields, the peaches of
his orchards, the wild grass seeds, nuts, fruits, and roots he or
his squaw could gather, and the products of his traps or the chase.
Here, then, was a restricted dietary. He had not much choice, nor a
large menu for each meal. The smaller the menu the less, as a rule,
any person will eat, be he Indian or white man. The extended menu is
a series of temptations to overeat. The simple menu of the Indian was
a preventive to gluttony. It will doubtless be recalled that when the
great Bismarck was broken down in health, his physicians gave him no
other prescription as to food than that he should eat but one kind of
food to a meal. This is a dietetic axiom: The less variety the less one
eats. In a diseased condition health can often be restored by giving
the stomach and assimilative organs less work to do.
Among the Indian race dyspepsia is almost unknown. To this fact that
they have a small variety of foods, this healthful condition is largely
attributable. On the other hand, one has but to pick up any daily
newspaper to see the positive proofs of the dyspeptic condition of the
“greatest nation of the world” among the white race. There are nostrums
for dyspepsia without end. Syrups, pills, doses that work while you
sleep, and dopes that work inside and out. Millions of dollars are
annually spent merely in advertising these damnable proofs of our
idiocy or gluttony, or both. A thousand nostrums flout their damned and
damning lies in the faces of the “superior race”! And a drug store on
every corner of our large cities demonstrates the great demand there
is for these absolute proofs of our vile dietetic habits. Every pill
taken, every nostrum swallowed, is a proof positive of our ignorance,
or our gluttony, or our gullibility, and probably a good deal of each.
Seventy-five millions of dollars were spent in 1905 in the purchase of
patent medicines, every cent of which was worse than wasted.
Before the white race came and perverted--pardon me, civilized--him,
what did the “uncivilized Indian” know of patent medicines? What did
he know of the diseases which these nostrums are supposed to cure?
Nothing! He was as ignorant of one as the other. In his native wildness
he was healthy and strong; only since he has been led into evil ways by
a false civilization has he so degenerated as to need such compounds.
Let us, then, forget our civilization,--this portion of it,--and forego
our physical ills and our patent nostrums, and go back to a simple,
natural, restricted diet. In that one course of procedure will be found
more restored health than all the physicians of the world can give
otherwise in a score of years. Let us learn to eat few things to a
meal, and those of such a nature that they will properly mix, and thus
not overtax the stomach in its work of digestion.
When I sit down to the laden tables of my rich friends, or at the
tables of the first-class hotels of the country, I sometimes find my
judgment stronger than my perverted appetite. At such times I look
over the bill of fare. I see ten or a dozen courses, varying from
cocktails, oysters, and fish to ice-cream, fruit, and wines. There are
meats and vegetables, nuts and fruits, cooked and uncooked, pastries
and jellies, soups and coffee, wines and spices, sauces, relishes,
and seasonings galore, and I am more or less disgusted with the whole
business, and eat sparingly of but two or three dishes. At other times,
alas! my appetite asserts itself, and I “go the pace” with the rest.
Now, when all these things, so elaborately prepared, so daintily
served, so “nicely” eaten, are disposed of and in the stomach, let me
ask (without any desire to offend): Is there the slightest difference
in the contents of the stomach of such a person and the stomach of a
hog filled with swill? In the first case there is cocktail and caviar,
olives and celery, oysters and soup, fish and entremes, entree and
roast, game and punch, ice-cream and cheese, pastry and fruit, nuts
and crackers, with water, coffee, tea, or wine to liquefy it all, all
taken separately, but now mixed in one horrible mess within, and in the
case of the hog they were mixed first and swallowed mixed instead of in
“courses.”
[Illustration: HOPI WOMAN, WITH BODY PARTIALLY EXPOSED, GRINDING CORN
AT THE MEAL TROUGH.]
O men and women of the white race, of the superior civilization,
quit such gluttony and disease-breeding courses! Get back to the
Indian’s simplicity in diet. Learn the meaning of “low living and high
thinking.” Stop pampering your sensual appetites and feeding your
stomachs at the expense of your minds, aye, and at the expense of
your souls, for men and women who thus live continuously, generally
become selfish, indifferent to the sufferings of others, “proud
stomached”--which means much more than it seems to mean--and incapable
of the finer feelings.
Nor is this all that the Indian may teach us as to diet. While at times
he eats everything he can lay his hands upon and also eats ravenously,
in his normal condition he eats slowly and masticates thoroughly. Since
Horace Fletcher wrote his most interesting and useful books on diet
and life, the term “fletcherizing” has become almost universal amongst
thoughtful people to express mastication to the point of liquifaction.
But I was familiar with “fletcherizing” before I had ever heard of Mr.
Fletcher. The Indians, with their parched corn, had taught me years
before the benefit of thorough and complete mastication. I had gone off
with a band of Indians on a hard week’s ride with no other food than
parched corn and a few raisins. This was chewed and chewed and chewed
by the hour, a handful of the grain making an excellent meal, and
thoroughly nourishing the perfect bodies of these stalwart athletes,
who never knew an ache or a pain, and who could withstand fatigue and
hardship without a thought.
[Illustration: MY HAVASUPAI HOSTESS PARCHING CORN IN A BASKET.]
A marked and wonderful effect of thorough mastication is that it
decreases the appetite from 10 to 15 per cent, and reduces the desire
for flesh meat from 30 to 50 per cent. The more we masticate the less
we desire to eat, and the more normal our appetites become. This in
itself is a thing to be desired, for it is far easier not to have an
abnormal appetite than it is to control it when it has fastened itself
upon us.
Then, too, while Indians will often eat to repletion, and at their
feasts indulge in disgusting gorging, they do know how to fast with
calmness and equanimity. I am not prepared to say that they will fast
voluntarily--except in the cases of those neophytes who are seeking
some unusual powers or gifts from Those Above--yet I do know that
several times I have been with them when fasting was obligatory because
of the scarcity of food, and they accepted the condition without a
murmur. I know a very prominent physician in San Francisco, who has
an extensive practice, who pumps the food out of the stomachs of
several of his gluttonous patients after their hearty French dinners.
He defends his course of procedure by saying that his patients would
not listen to him if he counseled fasting for even one meal, yet they
are willing to allow him to remove the food after it is eaten, and to
swallow some harmless “dope” that he gives them, because that is easy
and requires no self-control.
I know the power of appetite; I know how hard it is to eat only that
which the reason tells us is best. I know how hard it is to eat slowly
and thoroughly masticate the food, but I also know that these things
are imperative if one would have perfect health. Therefore, in spite
of my many lapses into the old habits, I persist in asserting the good
over the evil, and in teaching the good to others, in the hope that,
in my own case, the good course will become the easiest to follow, and
in the case of the young who listen to me they may learn the best way
before they have fallen into the evil way.
There is one other thing the white race might learn from the Indian,
and that is that the habitual use of flesh is not essential to health.
When Captain Cook visited the Maoris of New Zealand, he found them a
perfectly healthy people, and he states that he never observed a single
person who appeared to have any bodily complaint. Nor, among the number
that were seen naked, was once perceived the slightest eruption of
the skin, nor the least mark which indicated that such eruptions had
formerly existed. As Dr. Kress says:
“Another proof of the health of these people was the readiness with
which wounds they at any time received healed up. In a man who had been
shot with a musket-ball through the fleshy part of the arm, ‘his wound
seemed well digested, and in so fair a way to be healed,’ says the
Captain, ‘that if I had not known that no application had been made to
it, I should have inquired with very interesting curiosity after the
vulnerary herbs and surgical art of the country.’
“‘An additional evidence of the healthiness of the New Zealanders,’
he says, ‘is in the great number of old men found among them. Many of
them appeared to be very ancient, and yet _none_ of them were decrepit.
Although they were not equal to the young in muscular strength, they
did not come in the least behind them in regard to cheerfulness and
vivacity.’”
At the advent of Captain Cook, the Maoris were practically vegetarians;
they had no domestic or wild animals on the islands, hence could not
have been flesh eaters.
While our Indians of the Southwest will eat some forms of flesh at
times, they are, generally speaking, vegetarians. The Navahos scarcely
ever eat meat while in their primitive condition, and they are proud,
independent, high-spirited, vigorous, healthy, and strong. So with the
Havasupais and Wallapais, and most of the aborigines of this region.
The Apaches also are largely vegetarians, and yet are known as a fierce
and warlike people. They are fierce when aroused, but when friendly are
kindly disposed, honest, reliable and good workers, strong, athletic,
vigorous, and healthy. These facts demonstrate that flesh meat is not
necessary. Meat is another fetich of the civilization of the white
race, before which we bow down in ignorant worship. The world would be
far better off, in my judgment, and as the result of my observation and
experience, if we ate no flesh at all. Personally I am never so well
physically and my brain so active as when I live the vegetarian life,
though when I am at the tables of meat eaters I eat whatever comes and
make the best of it.
The experiences of thousands of healthy and vigorous white men
demonstrate that meat is not necessary to the highest development.
Weston, the great pedestrian, is both a teetotaler and vegetarian;
Bernarr Macfadden and several of his muscular helpers are practical
vegetarians; and athletes, business men, lawyers, judges, doctors,
clergymen, and many others testify to the beneficial effects of the
vegetarian diet. There is no man in the civilized world to-day that
works as hard and as continuously, physically as well as mentally,
as Dr. J. H. Kellogg of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He is a rigid
vegetarian, and seldom eats more than one meal a day. Yet he works
from 16 to 20 hours daily, edits two magazines, writes continually for
scientific magazines and periodicals, attends to a vast correspondence,
is the business head of the greatest sanitarium in the world, consults
annually with thousands of patients, and keeps daily watch of their
condition, gives numberless lectures, is always experimenting on foods
and surgical appliances and inventing new instruments and methods for
curing disease, and at the same time performs more surgical operations,
perhaps, with less fatal results, than any other surgeon in the
country. Besides this he is the president of the medical college,
and lecturer to the students, and gives many lectures to the Medical
Missionary Classes, and withal, finds time and strength to confer with,
direct the education of, and give personal love to the ten or fifteen
children he has adopted into his home and made his own.
Here is an additional item which adds strength to what I have written:
“The attention of medical men has recently been called to the case of
Gustav Nordin, a hardy Swede who paddled his own canoe from Stockholm
to Paris, reaching there in robust health after the long voyage, during
which he lived on apples, milk, water, and bread.
“The _New York Herald_ states that this dangerous and arduous voyage
was undertaken by the Swede to show what could be done by a man who has
given up meat, tea, coffee, wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco. He prides
himself in eclipsing those ‘vegetarians’ who continue the use of tea
and condiments.
“When in America, at the age of eighteen, Nordin was suffering so from
dyspepsia that he could not take ordinary food. He therefore began a
diet of fruit, principally apples, whereby he attained to his present
robust condition of health.”
So, meat-eating, alcoholic-liquor-drinking white race, cast aside your
high-headedness and pride, your dietetic errors and ill-health, at one
and the same time, and go and learn of the Indian simplicity of diet,
wise limitation of your dietary, careful and thorough mastication, and
abstention from all flesh foods.