- By Standing Bear Chief of
the Poncas
 The feathered and blanketed
figure of the American Indian has come to symbolize the American
continent. He is the man who through centuries has been moulded and
sculpted by the same hand that shaped the mountains, forest, and plains,
and marked the course of it rivers.
The American Indian is the
soil, whether it be the region of forest, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He
fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also
fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the
wild sunflowers; he belongs just as the buffalo belonged.
With a physique that
fitted, the man developed fitting skills -- crafts which today are
called American. And the body had a soul, also formed and moulded by
the same master hand of harmony. Out of the Indian approach to
existence there came a great freedom -- an intense and absorbing
love for nature; a respect for life; enriching faith in a Supreme
Power; and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and
brotherhood...
Becoming possessed of a fitting
philosophy and art, it was by them that native man perpetuated his
identity; stamped it into the history and soul of this country --
made land and man one. By living -- struggling, losing,
meditating, aspiring, achieving -- he wrote himself into the
ineraseable evidence -- an evidence that can be and often has been
ignored, but never totally destroyed.
The white man does not
understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand
America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The
roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and
soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still
has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some
of its fastnesses not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps
and inquiring eyes. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an
alien.
But the Indian spirit of the land
is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and
meet its rhythms. . . When the Indian has forgotten the music of
his forefathers, when the sound of the tom-tom is no more, when
the memory of his heroes is no longer told in story... he will
be dead.
When from
him has been taken all that is his, all that he has visioned in
nature, all that has come to him from infinite sources, he then,
truly, will be a dead Indian.
|
