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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,