What the White Race May Learn from the Indian

by George Wharton James

The experiences of thousands of healthy and vigorous white men demonstrate that meat is not necessary to the highest development. Weston, the great pedestrian, is both a teetotaler and vegetarian; Bernarr Macfadden and several of his muscular helpers are practical vegetarians; and athletes, business men, lawyers, judges, doctors, clergymen, and many others testify to the beneficial effects of the vegetarian diet. There is no man in the civilized world to-day that works as hard and as continuously, physically as well as mentally, as Dr. J. H. Kellogg of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He is a rigid vegetarian, and seldom eats more than one meal a day. Yet he works from 16 to 20 hours daily, edits two magazines, writes continually for scientific magazines and periodicals, attends to a vast correspondence, is the business head of the greatest sanitarium in the world, consults annually with thousands of patients, and keeps daily watch of their condition, gives numberless lectures, is always experimenting on foods and surgical appliances and inventing new instruments and methods for curing disease, and at the same time performs more surgical operations, perhaps, with less fatal results, than any other surgeon in the country. Besides this he is the president of the medical college, and lecturer to the students, and gives many lectures to the Medical Missionary Classes, and withal, finds time and strength to confer with, direct the education of, and give personal love to the ten or fifteen children he has adopted into his home and made his own.

Here is an additional item which adds strength to what I have written:

“The attention of medical men has recently been called to the case of Gustav Nordin, a hardy Swede who paddled his own canoe from Stockholm to Paris, reaching there in robust health after the long voyage, during which he lived on apples, milk, water, and bread.

“The New York Herald states that this dangerous and arduous voyage was undertaken by the Swede to show what could be done by a man who has given up meat, tea, coffee, wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco. He prides himself in eclipsing those ‘vegetarians’ who continue the use of tea and condiments.

“When in America, at the age of eighteen, Nordin was suffering so from dyspepsia that he could not take ordinary food. He therefore began a diet of fruit, principally apples, whereby he attained to his present robust condition of health.”

So, meat-eating, alcoholic-liquor-drinking white race, cast aside your high-headedness and pride, your dietetic errors and ill-health, at one and the same time, and go and learn of the Indian simplicity of diet, wise limitation of your dietary, careful and thorough mastication, and abstention from all flesh foods.

CHAPTER XI
THE INDIAN AND EDUCATION

Take it all in all, I think I believe more in the Indian’s system of education than our own,—I mean, in the principles involved. Our education is largely an education of books. We teach from books, we study from books, we get our ideas from books. Joaquin Miller’s reply to Elbert Hubbard, before quoted, seems to many people to be a foolish remark. But I see a profound thought in it. It was the poet’s protest against the too great use of books. He regards books as subversive of individual thought. He contends that books retard and prevent thought, and that we read, not to stimulate thought, but to deaden it. And undoubtedly too much reading and dependence upon books does deaden and destroy not only thought, but, alas! far worse still, the power to indulge in individual thought. Hence books are often a hindrance and a curse instead of a help and a blessing.

The Indian has no books. While he has tradition and legend, myth and story, he has no written word. Everything that is, as differentiated from everything that is supposed, in his life has to be personally learned by individual contact with the things themselves. Botany is the study of flowers, not of words about flowers. There is but one way we can really study botany, and that is out in the fields with the flower growing before us. It must be seen day in and day out from its planting until its fruition. All its development must be known and understood. The properties of its fruit, its roots, its stem, its leaves, for food, medicinal, manufacturing, or other purposes are all connected with the study. It is well to know the names of the plants, the names of all parts of plants, and the families and species to which they belong, but these latter things, important and interesting though they be, are but secondary or tertiary as compared with the primary out-door personal and intimate knowledge I have referred to.

Those who think the Indian uneducated should read Charles Eastman’s (Ohiyesa) book telling of his boyhood days with his Sioux parents and grandparents. Eastman is a full-blooded Sioux, and though later educated at Dartmouth College, still shows by his writings and words how much he reveres his wise teachers of the open air and the woods.