These are games that will not wear out while there are Indian boys to play them. On the oldest reservations, where even the grandfathers of the Indians now alive were shut up and fed by their government, the boys still play the old games. But wherever one travels to-day, even among the wildest tribes, a new era is seen to have begun as the result of the Indian schools, and Indian boys are being taught things more useful than any they ever knew before. The brightest boys in the various tribes are selected to be sent to these schools, and it is hoped that what they learn will make all the others anxious to imitate white men's ways.
COPY IN BLACK AND WHITE OF A COLOR-DRAWING BY AN INDIAN BOY
THE CHILDREN OF ZUÑI
BY MARIA BRACE KIMBALL
"Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
Oh, don't you wish that you were me?"
SO says the well-fed, well-dressed, well-housed little Scotchman in Robert Louis Stevenson's rhyme. But I don't believe that the small Indians of Zuñi would care at all to change places with the little "me" of Edinburgh or New York. In their village of mud and stone, on the sunny plains of New Mexico, they have lived for centuries in perfect contentment. Fine houses, green parks, and merry streets would be nothing to them; hats and parasols, candies and ice-cream would make them stare; and mere cleanliness would only astonish them. Indeed, if they saw us washing our faces and brushing our hair every day, they would probably one and all cry out in Zuñi words:
"Oh, don't you wish that you were me?"