A PROUD AND HAPPY WALLAPI MOTHER.
A HOPI BABY WHO HAS NEVER YET KNOWN CLOTHES.
CHAPTER XVII
THE INDIAN AND THE SANCTITY OF NUDITY
While adults of both sexes among all Indians wear either a skirt or a gee-string, there is not the slightest hesitancy in allowing the young, both boys and girls, to run about in a state of nudity. Since we have sent white teachers and missionaries to the Indians, they are beginning to learn that somehow—though they can’t sort it out just how or why—there is something indecent in allowing nude children to wander about their homes and villages. They are being taught to be “ashamed,”—their children are becoming sex-conscious as are our white children, long before their time, and we are foisting on to them our hateful, impure, and blasphemous conceptions of nudity. For myself I am free to confess that I have no sympathy with this kind of teaching. I think it unnecessary, and not only unnecessary but a positive injury. I believe in the sanctity of nudity, especially in that of young children, and while with our present social customs we cannot allow our children to be nude or partially nude in public, I would that our minds were as clean in this matter as are those of the Indians with whom I have so long been acquainted.
Whatever society may demand of us in public, there is no reason why, in private, both our children and ourselves should not spend a certain portion of every day, if possible, in contact with the direct rays of the sun and the air. Every school in the land should be so equipped, and our children and their parents be so trained, that, under proper direction, a certain part of every day the students could be so exposed. All know the benefit that comes from the exposing of the arms and legs to the sun and breezes at the sea-shore. Men, women, and children alike who flee the city for an annual holiday to the seaside return to their shut-in, civilized (!) life with renewed vigor and health. Why not give some of this life to city children every day in the year? Even in Eastern cities, in winter, a solarium could be created in the top stories of the schoolhouses, and there, with every window wide open, the children clothed in the scantiest of garments, as at the seaside, could go through physical and breathing exercises, and romp or play games for half an hour, to their great benefit both of body and mind.
We have for so long trained ourselves to the half expressed belief that there is something wrong about nudity that we find women’s clubs draping statues, and organizations rejecting figures because they are nude, which all ages and all civilized peoples have accepted as pure and chaste works of art. I would not for a moment have it thought that I approve of all nude statues or pictures. Many of them have no virtue to commend them. Yet I would not indiscriminately condemn all works of art in the nude merely because they are nude. We have forgotten the appearance of a healthy body, and feel ashamed to see one. By our mental attitude we accuse the Creator of indecency that “male and female created He them,” for, not only do we veil the bodies of the opposite sexes from each other, (which is a perfectly correct and wise thing to do) but daughters are ashamed to be seen nude by their own mothers, and mothers by their daughters. I believe in the sanctity of nudity. Let the sexes remain apart, by all means, but let there be less of false shame when men see nude men, or women see nude women, or either or both see nude children. It is a fact declared by the most conservative of white explorers, that the naked tribes of aborigines are the most pure, chaste, and truly modest. Our conception that because Indians are unclothed they are therefore indecent and unclean, impure and unchaste, is a dirty conception, dishonoring to ourselves and our Creator. Honi soit qui mal y pense, and “to the pure all things are pure” are as true to-day as when they were first spoken and written, and while I am as opposed as is any one living to nude pictures and statues that have nothing to commend them but their nudity; while I am strongly opposed to promiscuous nudity either in whole or in part, I am equally opposed to the mental attitude that nudity in itself is wrong, and that the Creator did not know His business when he created us both nude and of different sexes.
A HAVASUPAI CHILD BROUGHT UP
TO ENJOY BEING OUT IN THE
RAIN.