ART IN ANCIENT TIMES AND MODERN ART
Too much has been made of the presence of stone and bone tools among modern tribes. While there have been numerous instances of such clinging to old forms, yet students of modern Indian life, by their constant reference to these recurrences, have given a wrong impression to the world.
It is generally known and accepted that art passes through periods of transition. As an example one might cite the Renaissance. No student of art would confuse the Renaissance with an earlier or later period. Examples of earlier art still persisting during the early Renaissance are in evidence. But as the influence of the Renaissance broadened, all art of that period was affected, or leavened by it, and presently practically all art was Renaissance.
This is precisely true of Indian art. We search diligently to find an old, really old Navajo blanket to-day, and we pay a fabulous price for it. Likewise we search—but in vain—for old wooden bowls, painted buffalo robes, and feather mantles. The utmost corners of remote South America are visited by explorers from Harvard, the American Museum, and Berlin and London museums. Why? To discover primitive man untouched by civilization in order to record his arts and folk-lore, religion, and daily life, undefiled by contact with our civilization. Is it found? Scarcely an example remains—all is tinged and influenced even as the Renaissance changed the preRenaissance. If one will reflect a moment, one will agree that this is all true.
Examples of sculptures in stone, carving of shell, effigies in copper, ceramic art in the Cliff-Dweller country are in our leading museums. I would recommend readers to go to these museums and compare that real art with the wretched examples in vogue among the Indians at the present time.
I have said so much regarding ancient arts in various places in this book that now I wish to speak more particularly regarding certain tribes of Indians, among whom I spent the spring and summer of the year 1909, and contrast their art with stone-age art.
In March, 1909, I was sent by the Department of the Interior to investigate the condition of the Ojibwa Indians. I returned several weeks later and was again sent out the first of July and remained on the White Earth Reservation until in October. Because our work was to establish who were the full bloods, we came in contact with all the Indians of the Ojibwa tribe who claim to have no white or negro blood in their veins.
Among our eighteen or twenty witnesses, who were chiefs and persons ranging from seventy to eighty-five years of age, and who were familiar with the history of the Ojibwa, with the parents and grandparents of those whom we established to be full bloods, were several members of the grand medicine society, the Midiwewin. These persons were frequently examined by me through our interpreters—all of whom were the most competent we were able to procure and the best on the reservation—as to the past history of the Ojibwa tribe. The old record-keeper, commonly called Daydodge, but whose real name is Bay-bah-dwung-gay-aush, aged eighty-two, had a remarkable memory. To him had been related all the Hiawatha traditions by the Indians, and he was able to carry back history about one hundred and twenty years. This man told me that there were few, if any, stone implements in use among his people when he was a boy, and he did not think that stone objects were in use to any extent when his grandparents were children. He said that occasionally a woman hafted a stone celt and used it in scraping or cutting, that some stone mallets were to be found when his grandparents were young, but he thought that the French and English traders’ goods had displaced all stone articles in use among the Ojibwa.