The Indians were probably in their racial infancy when the maturer ranks marched in and absorbed, or otherwise destroyed them. It would seem that with them it is a case of arrested development. If left to themselves, through centuries they might have brought forth a civilization diametrically opposite to our own. That they never could nor can assimilate or profit by our social and educational methods has been sufficiently proved. Their race instincts are essentially as foreign to ours as those of the Hindu, and their evolution must have necessarily proceeded along totally different lines. The Indians were decreed to work out their own salvation or die, and the latter thing has come to pass. One might go on painting mental pictures of what would have been the result if the free, forest-born red race had thrived and grown into maturity. Certainly in their decadence, their spirit-broken second childhood, we find the germ of an original moral sense, of tradition and poetry, even of religion, which might have borne rich fruit.
The Oriental is to us an enigma, and we recognize in his makeup psychic qualities but slightly hinted of in ourselves. So in the Indian we must acknowledge a race of distinct and separate values that we can never wholly know or understand. The races are products of countless centuries begotten of habit and environment; we cannot put aside these growth-accumulations builded like the rings of the pine, nor can we take that which the Creator made and re-create it to suit our finite ends. Therefore, instead of helping the Indian we are merely killing him, kindly perhaps, with comforts, colleges and sacraments, but none the less surely striking at his life.
And though they are still amongst us, picturesque figures which we value chiefly as relics of a gaily-coloured past, the Indians are the mystery of our continent. They speak to us, they smile at us, they sit within our churches and use our tongue, but for all that they remain forever strangers. What pagan beliefs vibrating through the chain of unrecorded ancestry, what hates, loves, aspirations and bitter griefs, separate from our comprehension as the poles, thrill out of the darkness of yesterday and die unspoken, unformed, beneath those calm, bronze brows? They are a problem to be studied, never solved; a riddle one with the Sphinx, the Cliff Dwellers and the Aztec ruins. For, after all is said, what do even the good Fathers, with candle, crucifix and creed, know of their primal souls, of the unsounded depths of their hearts?
[THE PEOPLE OF THE LEAVES]
Francois