“I should like to, very much; but—won’t they object?”
“Perhaps I can arrange that,” and I started down the ladder. Several of the Indians glanced up, but, observing it was only Moungwi, said nothing.
“Here!” I called to them. “Here is a real friend of yours. You may not know him, but he understands many tribes, and their ways, and their signs. Put him to work. He can help with those costumes.”
One looked up from a robe he was painting, and thrust forward a brush and paints, as if to say: “Welcome, brother; fall to!”
The white visitor showed a rare facility. The Indians noticed it.
“You know him?” asked one, pointing to a design.
“Yes,” he said, naming it. [[206]]
They laughed delightedly, and soon he was friend to them all. I left him in the kiva, busily working with them and chatting as much as possible with a limited vocabulary and many descriptive gestures. This was Ernest Thompson Seton. I have not seen him since, but afterward he forwarded a letter, thanking me for his entrée to the wardrobe-room of the First Mesa, and giving some excellent advice concerning the things we had discussed before he signed on as costume-painter for the Hopi tribe. Among all the visitors I met in Hopi-land, he was one of very few who sensed the things that should be done and those not done for their welfare. Briefly, his idea was that the community life should not be violently disrupted, for fear of the effect our own isolated rural populations had suffered; and that efforts should be made to keep alive all that is best in the social and mesa-plan of living, without permitting the Indian people narrowly to confine themselves to it. This of course would include the harmless dances or shows, the social features that many confuse with ceremonies. I could recall the earnest efforts made by former Agents to induce the people to leave the mesa heights—notably that one beginning in 1891, when houses were built for them in the flats, and later completely furnished. By 1900 at least one hundred such houses had been placed at Hopi disposal. And I knew that in 1911 not more than half of those houses were used even temporarily. The people would return for the society of their kind, drawn, too, by intense religious feeling for the ancient mesa home.
I could recall two abortive efforts made toward the allotment of these people in severalty: the scheme to have them accept parcels of land, many of which were miles from water, and on which it would have been impossible [[207]]for families to subsist themselves, to say nothing of maintaining their sheep and other stock. The first of these allotment plans blew up in 1894; but the Bureau, wedded to the allotment theory, was not deterred. A second and most expensive effort died in 1911, after friends of the Indian plainly showed the farce of the proceedings, if they said nothing as to the inhuman side of it. This did not please the allotting agent, eager for his pay and job, nor his son, nor his assistants, nor the camp cook and the other hangers-on of an allotting crew. But thank God! it died, nevertheless.
The average bureaucrat, admiring the Allotment Acts, thinks that an Indian’s head may be jammed into a regulation lathe, and with a few twists and spins turned out a full-fledged Mid-west agriculturist—just such a man as Thompson Seton said needed community centres made for him, to keep him from becoming an inmate of an insane asylum. Just so. But it cannot be done, my masters, with the speed of the mimeograph that grinds out your tirades and exhortations. Your Allotment Acts have been good friends to South Dakotans and others who wished to speculate in lands; but they have produced untold misery among the Indian peoples, and have utterly destroyed an innocent and simple phase of American life.