University of Virginia Library

THE INDIAN OF COMMERCE.

For purposes of literary classification, all Indians may be divided, quite regardless of linguistic affinities, into three sole tribes—the human, the inhuman, and the super-human. There is the actual aborigine, interesting to competent fiction as to science because he is a man and at the same time a living archive from the childhood of the race. There is the wooden eikon which stands for questionable cigars or unquestionable penny-a-lining—in either case a mere peg upon which to hang commercial profit. And there is also the Red Man of Rhapsody—a conveniently distant fiction to carry heroics which would seem rather too absurd if fathered upon poor human nature as we see it next door. With the last-mentioned tribe deals one of the handsomest and one of the most preposterous books of the season, 'A Child of the Sun,' by Charles Eugene Banks (Stone). Brilliant as a parrot in mechanical coloration, the text also seems to have undergone some mental "three-color process." Fenimore Cooper was cold ethnography to this, and even Prescott's Empire of Montezuma quite as true to life. There is nothing Indian in these pages, except the good intention. A curbstone version of the "legend" of the Piasau serves for warp; and into it the author has woven a truly curious fabric of girl-graduate mundiloquence and scope. Nominally in prose, the book is in fact very largely couched in wilful and poor Hiawathan measure, doubly cheap by being masked in "long type." Perhaps the most diagrammatic comment on the quality of the volume is in its own exemplary lines about "Pakoble," belle of the "Arctide" tribe, who was "so perfect in beauty that the artists of the Arctides often begged the favor of her time, that they might preserve her loveliness to future generations." It must be said that the fifteen "color-type" illustrations, by Louis Betts, are far and away above their company and their sort. Of no value as racial types, they are very uncommonly attractive and sympathetic, and not without a touch of real poetry in conception as well as in color-scheme. Its whole dress would befit a worthier volume.

In boards and "bleating buckskin" (born sheep) and of a cover design grateful to the aesthetic if not to the scientific eye, 'An Alphabet of Indians' (Russell) is a

posthumous collection from Emery Leverett Williams. The twenty-six folio-page drawings, bluntly posteresque, are not ill-done in their sort. As to verisimilitude, however, they are much closer to the alphabet than to the Indian—as doubtless should be expected of diversions in this category, under which the dragon's teeth of Cadmus come up, with the processional years, as Brownies, Gibson-Girls, Pickaninnies, Wild Animals I Have Guessed At, and so on. It is a special altruism of the alphabet that it furnishes more or less pretext for just about the largest number of drawings that may safely be marketed at once. All twenty-five of the tribes here compulsorily foregathered look much more like one another than like themselves, and the ethnic differentiation of them would be hopeless but for the convenient lettering. The alternate pages of text are wholly commonplace, and very largely misleading—thanks, chiefly, to an apparent system of attributing traits, heard-of as "Indian," to the tribe whose page chances to have most space left. "Travvis poles," and jackrabbits that burrow, are among the contributions to knowledge here presented. Children, at whom the book is seemingly levelled, will find no special thrill in its pictures, and no competent information whatever in its letterpress.

George Bird Grinnell's 'Jack among the Indians' is a boy's book, in which interest must derive from no special magnetism or impulse of the author, but from his peculiarly matter-of-fact habit of narration, as of a real happening in settings as familiar to him as attractive to all boys. This is not necessarily dispraise. Like Mr. Grinnell's more serious work, this tale is an unimaginative, every-day presentment of Western and Indian themes by a man who has a very unusual practical familiarity with both.

Amid the perennial output of books which might in fact just as well be about any other topic whatever, but, for considerations of the market, are anilined with a weak suffusion of Indian, it is a grateful pleasure to commend Albert Ernest Jenks's honest and unpretentious story of 'The Childhood of Ji-Shib, the Ojibwa.' It is for "popular" consumption, but Dr. Jenks's technical paper on "The Wild Rice Gatherers of the Upper Lakes" gave us reason to expect the accuracy we find here. Without special literary grace, beyond its directness and homely intuition, the little book is workmanlike, interesting, and informative. It will appeal to unspoiled children of any age, and will repay their interest with principle. The author's decorations can hardly be said to better the page. Nor does Professor McGee's introduction add to the accuracy of a generally reliable book, with his gloss upon "the Red Man" and the "Red child." Our aborigines are brown. A veritable "Red Indian" would be as much a treasure for any museum as a marked man among his people. With much more creditable observation, he calls us "red."

For reasons not particularly obscure, our generic Indian policy seems not only not to stimulate, but in fact to strangle, the individual and potential mentality which all first-hand students have detected in our American aborigine. Politically denied the civic status and responsibility which should develop him; submerged in an interminable tutelage which is devised rather for the tutor's convenience than for the ward's betterment, and has no logical plan of majority; bound down to a scheme of "education" which is almost exclusively materialistic, it is small wonder that he has failed to give us a literature which should have been fascinating and precious almost beyond compare—the unadulterated expression of a people clear-thinking, unsophisticated, far nearer to nature than we may ever again come, and of opportunity for a valuable connotation of our own history. That which should have been the foreword of any real conspectus of "American Literature," the word of the First Americans, has somewhere been smothered in our processes. The great Government print-factory schools turn out still faster their bolts of human calico, and in more unvarying patterns of mediocrity. With another generation, the literal aboriginal mind, with all its value of originality, individuality, and nearness to the unsophisticated fact, will have disappeared. There will be Indians no longer, but smatters of "white men" under a brown complexion. We have somewhere, somehow, wasted our chance to bring out one of the most significant, instructive, and delightful members American scholarship might have had—the classics of the First Americans. And this is strange, for a consciously superior nation. We have thus far developed nothing to rival, nor even fairly to suggest, that astonishing "school" of American Indian poets, essayists, theologues, and historians evolved and nurtured by Spanish rule in Mexico, Peru, and other American colonies, more than three hundred years ago. The poetry, the oratory, the simple but adequate philosophy, of our own tribes, have been clearly enough vouched for, and more or less competently recorded, by our students of their folklore, their ethnology, and their history—but why not by themselves? Why have we had no Tezozomoc, no Camargo, no Diego Duran, no Salcamayhun, no Ixtilixochitls, to give us American history from the side of the invaded? Why not even a Garcilaso de la Vega, whose notorious 'Comentarios Reales' and 'Florida del Inca' are quite as scientific and sober history as much that still sells enormously among us in three-volume editions; whose sixteenth-century ethnology is still unconfessedly followed in very many pretentious works; and whose rare and hardly known little volume of poems (1581) is as saturated a solution of Virgil as the best Harvard undergraduate of them all could write now if he tried?

The answer is, of course, that our Government plan of Indian education is neither devised nor operated by poets and historians, nor yet aimed at producing them. It has devolved some Indian police, some Rough Riders amenable to Rooseveltian discipline, several very tolerable brass-bands, and foot-ball teams much more than tolerable. But these are its jewels. Its average output is of cobblers, tinkers, typesetters, and the like, who can have no livelihood if they go home to their nomad fathers, and who presently will be "looked after" by the labor unions if they presume to practise these industries in competition with "Americans." Also, farm hands—not at all farmers, for they are taught by non-farmers, mostly, and in every event taught the tenets which are not only useless but prejudicial when applied to the unlike climatic conditions where their tribal lands are situated. Most vital of all, as a smotherer of human development, our system takes the Indian child away from home (confessedly, the farther the better), for more convenience of the instructor, and teaches him not only without, but practically against, the filial and human affections. In effect, the Indian home figures in this plan simply as a potential breeder of more pupils—who must, however, be taught, with more or less brutal directness, to despise their parents, and who are forced to abandon any language in which they might converse with those parents. The vital wisdom of the old plan, perhaps unformulated, but so basic that its common-sense humanity atoned for and outweighed the feudal and ecclesiastic coloration, was that it taught and uplifted the home and the child at the same time. If the child must learn Spanish, so did his parents. He was still able to talk with his mother—and now in two languages. It is notorious that in our scheme many children are sent home unable to speak to or understand their mothers in any tongue whatever. There was in the old régime a certain devout patience (lacking in ours) which did not have to extinguish the native tongue to teach the new one. Under that mediaeval system, the pupil was part of the family and part of the State; not a mere unit of raw material for a machine-tender to "work up" on salary.

Yet now and then, by sheer character, an Indian does rise superior to our Governmental planing-machine—not because of our system, but in its direct despite. For instance, it is notorious that the remarkable papers of Zitkala-Sa in the Atlantic brought down upon her head an avalanche of instructorial wrath— most of it in ludicrous rhetorical contrast to her clean and high-minded style. Yet those papers were true and of serious value, as field students know, and from the merely literary viewpoint had an uncommon quality and a humanity as unsullied and refreshing as a mountain brook.

Entirely different, but of no less significance, is 'The Middle Five,' by Francis la Flesche, son of the Omaha chief E-Sta-ma-za, and well known to students by his collaboration with Miss Fletcher upon the folklore and songs of his people. It is an unaffected, admirably human, story of Indian boyhood at school—a modest Omaha 'Tom Brown'; charming because so real and unconscious a human document; valuable because so literal a transcript of the aboriginal mind. In the introduction, Mr. La Flesche says, in the quietest way, many things whose apparently innocent sarcasm will doubtless be least felt by those who are most in need of it. The frontispiece, a sympathetic drawing in colors, adds to the virtue of the book, for it is by a young Indian girl striving against mostly objective odds to make a living as an American illustrator, Miss Angel de Cora. Thoroughly likable for its own sake, this little volume must have its place with libraries and students as one of the very few, and one of the most considerable, literary productions of our conterminous American Indian.