THE INDIAN AND ART WORK
Even our artists and designers may learn much of great importance from
the Indian. While to most of my readers it may come as a surprise
that I claim great artistic powers for the Indian, yet no one can
carefully study the basketry and pottery of the Amerind and not know
the perfect justice of the claim. In my larger work on this subject[5]
I have fairly discussed the ability of the Indians in this regard; and
to those who are not aware of the vast debt the white race owes to
the aboriginal woman in artistic as well as other lines, I earnestly
commend a perusal of that masterly work by a conscientious and thorough
student, Otis T. Mason, of the Smithsonian Institution, entitled
“Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture.”
[5] Indian Basketry and How to Make Indian and Other Baskets.
In reference to their basketry, however, more than a mere passing
mention is required. The Indian weaver shows marvelous ability in the
creation of form, color, stitch, and design. Turning to Nature for
her original inspirations she is not a mere copyist of what others
have done. All her forms are based upon utility, and therefore meet
the first and highest requirement of all art when applied to articles
that are to serve a useful purpose, viz., adaptation to use. There
is no reversal of principles in manufacture, as is so often the case
with white workers who value appearance, so-called ornament, finish,
etc., rather than adaptation to purpose or utility. Wherever anything
is allowed to usurp the place of this primary element, the work is
doomed even before it is made. On the other hand, frankness, honesty,
simplicity, directness, characterize the manufactures of the Indian.
They are to serve such and such a purpose; that purpose is openly
denoted. The result is that, to the unperverted eye, the artistic work
of the unspoiled Indian is as perfect in form as it can be. There is no
wild straining after unique effect; no fantastic distortions to secure
novelty; everything is natural and rational, and therefore artistically
effective.
[Illustration: ONE OF THE FINEST YOKUT BASKETS IN EXISTENCE.]
In color, too, the original work of the Indian weavers, before the vile
aniline dyes were forced upon them by the “civilized” and “Christian”
traders and missionaries, was above criticism. The old baskets and
blankets are eagerly sought after, at fabulous prices, by the most
refined and critical of artists and connoisseurs because of the
perfection of their color harmonies. In every good collection are to be
seen such specimens that are both the admiration and despair of modern
artists.
As for weave, it is asserted upon the highest authority that there is
not a weave or stitch known to modern art that was not given to our
civilization by the aborigines. And they have many stitches of great
effectiveness that we have not availed ourselves of. Take the Pomas
alone--a tribe of basket-makers who live in northern California. They
have not less than fourteen different stitches or weaves, some of them
of marvelous beauty and strength. In one of the accompanying pictures
is a specimen of their carrying baskets. This basket will hold a large
load of seeds or fruit, and when so laden requires a construction of
great durability to sustain the burden. It is woven with this express
purpose in view, yet it is artistically decorated with a beautifully
worked out design. Here is an important lesson the white race might
learn, viz., that the utensils of daily life should be surrounded
with as much beauty as is practical. The kitchen should be as full of
enjoyment to the eye, in reason, as the parlor. The cook and maid need
æsthetic surroundings as well as--indeed, more than,--the mistress
and her children. If social custom insists upon making servants of
one part of its members, the other part should be willing to make
their “servitude” as comfortable and beautiful as is possible and
practicable. Think of these poor, ignorant(!) Indian women making
baskets for porridge, carrying baskets, plaques for holding food, mush
bowls, and a score of other purposes, all beautifully decorated and
ornamented with designs that express some emotion of their own souls,
some ambition, some aspiration, or some happy memory.
[Illustration: EXQUISITE DESIGN ON A FINE YOKUT INDIAN BASKET.]
In the matter of these designs the white race has much it may learn
from the Indian. Sometimes I have looked upon the patterns and colors
of our wallpapers, our rugs, our carpets, our chintzs, our calicoes,
and especially upon the wool work or embroidery of some women, and have
been compelled to ask myself if hideousness could be carried to any
further extent. Some of the designs were the absolute delirium tremens
of craziness,--conventionality reconventionalized again and again,
until it was made unlike to anything in “the heavens above, the earth
beneath, or the waters under the earth.”
[Illustration: A MISSION INDIAN BASKET OF GOOD DESIGN.]
I was once lecturing to a “civilized” and “cultivated” audience upon
this subject of Indian designs that have a personal meaning, and when
I got through I heard one highly civilized and cultivated man exclaim
in disgust: “Why, he’ll soon try to make us believe that our own
wall-paper patterns ought to mean something!”
[Illustration: A CHEMEHUEVI BASKET OF BEAUTIFUL FORM AND DESIGN.]
Most certainly I will! The idea that we, the superior, the wise race,
use designs in our goods that are supposed to be beautiful to us, and
yet that have no meaning! What absurdity and foolishness for our girls
and women to spend hours on “fancy-work” (!), the designs of which
are a crazy, intricate something to be dreaded rather than admired.
The Indians have more sense than to waste their time over such
foolishness. They have studied Nature in all her varying forms, and
their minds are stored up with a thousand and one designs which they
can transfer at pleasure to their basketry, pottery, or blanketry. I
have had the pleasure of teaching this basic principle of art work to
many white women, and I learned it from the Indian. One woman wanted to
get a design for her sofa pillows. I asked her if she had no flowering
vine over her porch. She said “Yes.” “Then copy its leaf and flower,”
was my reply, and when she did so, and saw the beauty of the design
she had _created_ from Nature, her soul was filled with a new joy, and
she wrote me that few things had given her more pleasure than the
discovery of that basic principle.
[Illustration: BASKET BOWL MADE BY PALATINGWA WEAVER.]
Think of the white race making baskets. Where do they go to for their
forms and designs? In thousands of cases they take my own books and
copy from them! But where did I get them? I am no creative artist,
no inventor of design! I got them, “body, soul, and breeches,” from
the Indian,--every one of them; and yet the “superior race” must go
to them to copy, instead of so disciplining the powers of observation
from Nature that designs for embroidery, for basketry, for fancy-work
of every description, are contained within their own memories. The
Indian’s life has trained these wonderful faculties of observation and
memory. He was compelled to watch the animals in order that he might
avoid those that were dangerous and catch those that were good for
food; to follow the flying birds that he might know when and where
to trap them and secure their eggs; the fishes as they spawned and
hatched; the insects as they bored and burrowed; the plants and trees
as they grew and budded, blossomed and seeded. He became familiar,
not only with such simple things as the movements of the polar
constellations and the retrograde and forward motions of the planets,
but also with the less known spiral movements of the whirl-winds as
they took up the sands of the desert; and the zigzags of the lightning
were burned into his consciousness and memory in the fierce storms
that, again and again, in darkest night, swept over the exposed area in
which he roamed; with the flying of the birds, the graceful movements,
the colors, and markings of the snakes, the peculiar wigglings of
insects, and their tracks, and those of reptiles, birds, and animals,
whether upon the sand, the snow, the mud, or more solid earth, he soon
became familiar. The rise and fall of the mountains and valleys, the
soaring spires and wide-spreading branches of the trees, the shadows
they cast, and the changes they underwent as the seasons progressed,
the scudding or anchored clouds in their infinitude of form and
color, the graceful arch of the rainbow, the peculiar formation and
dissipation of the fogs, the triumphant lancings of the night by the
gorgeous fire-weapons of the morning sun, the stately retreat of the
king of day as evening approached,--all these and a thousand and one
other things of beauty in Nature the Indian soon learned to know, and
from all these mental images he can readily draw when a design is
needed.
[Illustration: AN EXQUISITELY WOVEN YOKUT BASKET SHOWING ORIGIN OF ST.
ANDREW’S CROSS, FROM THE DIAMOND OF THE RATTLESNAKE.]
Is it not well that the white race should learn to observe the things
of Nature? We have a few nature writers: Thoreau, John Burroughs, Olive
Thorne Miller, Elizabeth Grinnell, John Muir, Ernest Seton Thompson,
Wm. J. Long, and Theodore Roosevelt, but why should we need nature
books? We have the whole field of Nature for our own; every page is
open to us, and the need of these books is proof that we have not, and
do not, take the trouble to read Nature for ourselves. The Indian does
better than this. He is a personal student. He finds joy and mental
development in the results of his own observation, and until the white
race learns his lesson, it will be behind him in its joy in Nature,
its wisdom gained from Nature, in the physical health, vigor, and
strength that Nature always gives to her devotees, and in the true art
development that alone can come from familiarity with Nature in all her
varying moods.