1 Indian songs are spontaneous and arise from story or ceremony which are their matrix. They take us back of the music of antiquity, and are, like wild flow- ers, never domesticated. Their themes are of love, peace, war, death, heroes, ani- mals or birds, thunder, prayers, children. Alice Fletcher says that music envel- opes the Indian's individual and social life like an atmosphere. Some of these songs have been harmonized by J. C. Fillmore and by Arthur Farwell.1 Many songs are wordless, vocables being used only to float the voice. They have no in- struments save only the voice, drum, and rattle, and anything like poetry is still less developed. They show that music arose, like language, from mental necessity. Here, as in so many other fields, America is a " fossil bed " abounding in prehis- toric records to which scholars look to fill gaps. Indian songs are very numerous but brief and abrupt. They break out in the climax of a dramatic story at a point where words are not sufficient. The most pathetic song is that of the ghost dance blended from several old ceremonials. It is an appeal to the unseen world to comfort those doomed to slow extinction. In the trance that follows they see the landscape of ancient days before the paleface came, abounding in game, and meet the spirits of their ancestors. It is " the cry of a people forsaken by the gods in which they once trusted." It is essentially peaceful. The Indian singer is not making a musical presentation to an audience. He simply pours out his feelings regardless of artistic effect. All is subjective. Choral music is in unison, the men singing an octave lower. The voice constantly stirs from one tone to another, and singing is mostly out of doors amidst the voices of nature, often drowned by it and the sole accompaniment of the drum. Each tribe and each society has its songs with initiating rites, and the right to songs is bought, the sellers teaching it to the pur- chasers. Fines are imposed for incorrect singing. The voice is commonly pulsed creating a rhythm within a rhythm. When the Indian hears our music his atten- tion is distracted by the thud of the hammer, beats, the disconnection of tones and other noises which he finds it hard to ignore. Our harmonization suggests unison and makes his melodies sound natural.
1 See Indian Story and Song from North America. Alice C. Fletcher. Boston, 1900, p. 126. Also Am. Indian Melodies. The Wa- Wan Press, Newton Centre, Mass.
696 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE musical talent had " brought her into the iron routine of the buzzing civilizing machine, she felt like an animal driven by a herder or a mummy bound up for burial; like a slender tree uprooted from her mother nature and God. No one now reasoned with her quietly as her mother used to do." No Indian child " was ever disrespectful to his parents until he had come under the civilizing influence of the whites," who have failed to preserve the native virtues of the teepee. We have robbed the Indians, but never so wrongly as in forcing their children from their homes without parental consent to imprison them in a remote school, which should be brought to them and not they to it.1 Welling2 makes a most incisive criticism on mission work among them and says none can do good but only harm, unless based on mechanical and practical arts and schools.
The Indians are not all alike, but as different as Turk and German. None now live as nomads or hunters. In the reservations, very like Weyler's concentrado camps, they are corraled and impounded, and can not leave, paint, or celebrate their dances, which are holy passion- plays to them, must cut their hair, and have little incentive to activity of mind or even body. Hamlin Garland8 tells us that nearly every tribe is divided into radicals and conservatives. The latter are the oldest, strongest, bravest, most dignified and intellectual, with spirits unbroken though they are in rags — real patriots. Said one northern chief, " I will not clean the spittoons of the white man's civilization." When they lose self-respect, they sink to vagabondage; if we break their wills, we destroy them. " The allotment of lands in severalty, which began in land lust, and is being carried to the bitter end by those who believe a stone-age man can be developed into a citizen of the United States in a single generation, is in violent antagonism to every wish and innate desire of the red man, and has failed of expected results." It is somber and pitiful to isolate a Sioux tribes- man to the lonely life of the poor Western rancher. No man is more sociable or gregarious than the red man. He dreads solitude, which was the old tribal punishment; hence their reluctance to the Dawes land theories and the clinging to the lodge.
" When an ethnologist," writes J. Walter Fewkes in a letter to me,' August, 1900, " lives isolated for many months among primitive people for the purpose of studying their customs, he puts himself in sympathy with their race-thought in order that he may look at nature as they do. When this is long continued, the whole world assumes a different aspect; the wind, rain, snow, lightning, etc., come to be seen through the eyes of primitive men, and to have a meaning very different from that taught by science. One thus comes to think as an Indian thinks, in a way which a student without this experience can 1 City and State, June 7, 1900.
2 Smith. Misc. Coll., vol. xxv, 1883. Trans. Anthrop. Soc., Washington, vol. i, 8 The Red Man's Present Needs. North American Review, April, 1902.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT never understand. If this influence is so great with an educated eth- nologist, how much greater with uneducated men! The influence of the Indians on the teachers in our Indian schools shows this. Unlike the ethnologists, they have little sympathy with aboriginal customs, no matter how intimate their contact with tribal Indian life, because their business is to break up these customs. White children brought up with Indian children in equal numbers would be influenced far more than they would influence. The Hopi can teach the Kansas farmer how to raise corn in a desert, and whoever tries to farm in his ancestral home, Arizona, must adopt the methods of irrigation which the ancestors of the Hopi used before America was discovered. A primitive man familiar with the environment knows its possibilities better than an incoming civilized man, whose life has become adapted to different conditions. The arctic explorer adopt? Eskimo habits to keep warm, to travel, and to provide food. It would take a large book to enumerate all the benefits of American frontier life which can be traced to the Indians. In short, every primitive race pro- foundly affects every civilized race with which it comes in contact, as every individual civilized man who lives with Indians is himself influenced as much as he influences. Much is now said about the good Indian schools do the red men, but I hope the time is near when we can consider in a scientific frame of mind what we owe to the primi- tive race which our ancestors found on this continent."
The late Mr. Gushing, whose genius for sympathetically working his way into the very arcanum of the savage soul is unsurpassed in all literature or history,1 insists that tribal prejudice must be first known, then respected; that the spirit of people, however low, should not be broken; that the teacher should pass a long apprenticeship as a student among those whom he is to serve; must be passionately fond of helping them; neither show nor have any sense of superiority; and must make them earnestly wish for his teaching. He must study everything in their lives as a grafter studies all the most favorable points in a well-grown tree of wild stock to insert new scions. He insists that all who know the Indians well must love them; declares that they are at bottom profoundly religious, with the utmost fidelity to all their sacred teachings; and that their deep religious feeling, which animates all their minutest customs and which is instinct with a crude yet sublime philosophy, must not be weakened. We must assume that our religion is only another form of theirs; must under- stand how tragic and destructive all sudden transitions to culture are; that they love their traditions incalculably more than we do our own, and that most of their customs work for morality and are based upon their myths.1 1 Twenty-eighth Report of the Indian Bureau, 1896, p. 209.
'The Zunis, for instance, tie and gag a drunken man on the theory that thus his soul will not wander and be lost. This is bad psychology, but keeps them temperate. Their girls and women have a habit of lowering their face and shak- 83 698 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE Our opinion of Indians is too analogous to that of Cal- vinists concerning the depravity of infants. But if they are bad, we are responsible and we should have them on our con- science and feel accountable for their future. To always live on the edge of the last ditch is to cultivate the qualities of a wild animal at bay. Had we developed their best rather than their worst traits, had we made it our rule to win their delib- erate approval for our measures, had we recognized their many and essential contributions to our civilization,1 had we seen that, as A. L. Benedict concludes, " the aborigines are not in all respects our inferiors," and that " the key-note to the Indian character is his religion," had we conserved at least the best of their industries (Purdy says the Pomos attained the highest art in basketry ever reached and that now it is rapidly becoming a lost art), had we learned earlier from them, what savagery has but just taught Sorel and Him, that the highest mission of art is to ennoble labor, how incon- ceivably different all would have been. I have before me as I write a manuscript volume of Indian prayers collected by Samuel P. Hayes. They are addressed to the Great Spirit, to the sun, moon, the soul of vegetation, animals, the ghost of the dead, but the soul of every true Christian must be warmed and at the same time rebuked by this fervor and faith.2 To uproot all this would be a crime against the soul. Happily it is impossible. We must not cut the Indian off from his past, must cultivate native amusements, not break the power of the chiefs, and " make him an admirable red man as Booker Washington is trying to make the negro an ing their hair over it in the presence of strangers, and did not respond readily to Eastern teachers ignorant of their customs, who told them to hold up their heads and look boldly into the faces of strangers as if they had nothing to be ashamed of. Under their matriarchal system to do this was brazen, wanton, and indecent, worse than to invite a man to marry them. Again, their dances, which prudes condemn, are like holy passion-plays, wherein they rehearse the great deeds of their gods and heroes, and revive their golden age in the same spirit as that which has made the success of Wagner's operas.
1 A. F. Chamberlain: The Contributions of the American Indian to Civiliza- tion. Proc. Am. Antiquarian Soc., 1903.
2 Has the Indian been Misjudged? Int. Journal of Ethics, 1901. See also G. B. Grinnell: The Indian of To-day, New York, 1900, pp. 185; The Childhood of Jishib, by A. E. Jenks, Madison, Wis., 1900, pp. 130; Articles by native Indians and others in the Southern Workman.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT 699 admirable black man." Wg should not suppress but develop the reservation, but not forbid him to leave it, or to smoke, or give up his teepee or skin clothing, or go to church. To educate by teaching children not to honor but to abhor their parents is monstrous and unchristian. Their teachers should, as Hamlin Garland urges, rescue perishing forms and symbols, and if possible develop new ones based on the old. These would give self-respect and make him feel that he is worth while. They and negroes need a training about as different as any two native races that could be found, and to educate them together is especially hard on the red man.
From Catlin and Schoolcraft down to Powell, Mason, Wilson, Horatio Hale, Brinton, Pilling, Dorsey, Gushing, Fewkes, Fletcher, Stephens, Mooney, Hough, Matthews, Holmes, James, Bqas, McGee, Mindeleff, Chamberlain, Voth, Coues, and many others, the Indian has been studied with an interest, sympathy, and insight probably quite unparalleled, by men whose love of truth and whose self-denial and hard- ships in its pursuit is as genuine as the missionaries' love of souls. While generally subsidizing this work, our Govern- ment has not used its results; but the Indian Bureau, when not a corrupt ring, and even legislators, have rarely consulted these experts, who seldom appear even on the Lake Mohawk programs. The mind of the missionary has been so pre- possessed with his own apcrgus that he has often been singu- larly incompetent to profit by the results of these studies, which should have been a part of his professional training. Most of all impervious is the mind of the average teacher of Indian children, although in all these fields there have been exceptions well known and unknown. At root the " Indian question " can not be solved by Congress, the army, the clergy, or the pedagogue. It lies mostly beyond the ken of the his- torian. The only real authority in the field is the ethnologist who has lived with the Indian as he lives, won his confidence and taken his point of view and read the literature about him. Even the anthropologist who devotes himself to the work of digging open mounds, comparing1 arrow-fleams or the modes of releasing the bowstring, measuring skulls, bodily dimen- sions, acuteness of sense, often has no light in his soul that is not darkness, and some seem indifferent to the welfare of 700 THE PSYCHOLOGY Ol< ADOLESCENCE the aborigines. From the standpoint of this book this is un- scientific, because in all studies of man's psychic life moral distinctions are supreme. Arduous as is the work of accurate observation and sympathetic interpretation (Fewkes thinks all previous studies of the Moqui snake dance, painstaking as they have been, were radically wrong), it is not complete till we are told what in it is good and what bad for the savage, what next higher cult it most resembles, or how the best of its psychic content can be given a better interpretation or alternative expression. To do this requires far wider knowl- edge and a far higher order of mind, but the purest and the only complete science, a true psychology must now insist, is practical, and pedagogic applications are not open to the charge of utilitarianism, but it is precisely in these that the culture of to-day and still that of to-morrow culminates as surely as the will is the key to the intellect. The Indian has been sympathetically studied far longer than has childhood and youth, but this rich body of knowledge remains unused. Experts like Gushing and Miss Fletcher are not heard even as to what not to do. Were they mute if asked what next steps to take in order to fulfil and not destroy, the sociologist, genetic psychologist, and the student of comparative religion should take up their work and address themselves to the task. One of the chief functions of religion is to conserve the past in history and to see to it that the older and deeper powers of the soul that can make for righteousness are not repressed, but brought out.
VI. India. — From what has just preceded it is plain that race pedagogy needs a far fuller treatment, which I have long planned and hope to attempt. We must pause for a yet more cursory glance at what is commonly regarded as the world's masterpiece of colonization where extinction is not threatened or hardly possible. India contains 294,000,000 inhabitants, or nearly one-fifth of the human race. We little know the vast- ness of even calamities in Asia. In 1877 the Yellow River, long been walled till it had deposited a bed high above the country, broke loose and flowed in some places 30 miles wide, 10 feet deep, and 20 miles an hour, destroying, the Times said, 10,000 square miles, from 1,000 to 3,000 villages, 7,000,000 persons, and most of their cattle.
ADOLESCENT RACES AND THEIR TREATMENT?OI Of its many tongues and dialects only eleven are spoken by as many as five millions each, and English is twenty-eighth, being the language of but 224,000. All these people are ruled by 1,500 officials in black and 65,000 soldiers in red. England has broken up wars between hostile races, enforced order and taught respect for justice, broken up a few customs abhor- rent to civilization and developed a few colonial adminis- trators of the highest type,. James Brooke, Stanford Raffles, Sir Andrew Clark, Sir George Grey, and others. Nowhere have the problems of life been more pondered, and there is no depth of crime or height of virtue not found in India. The people mostly live in small villages and religion dominates life.
William Digby,1 who has had long personal acquaintance in India, presents an astounding array of facts and figures from official records to show that India is progressively worse off for being a province of the Crown, and takes as his motto, Earth is sick and Heaven is weary Of the hollow words that states and kingdoms utter When they talk of truth and justice.
He insists that the country is certain to do worse in the future than in the past. From an income of two pence per head per day in 1850, the country had sunk in 1882 to one and one-half pence, and in 1900 to three-fourths of a penny per head per day. Mr. Digby had access to many reports, marked confidential, and refused in the House of Commons. From the many tables and careful analyses, province by province, he shows with apparent impartiality that England has more or less completely suppressed.murder of parents and children, human sacrifices, suicide, voluntary and involuntary torments, and slavery. Among his indictments may be summarized the following: From the eleventh to the eighteenth century, before British rule, there were from one to four famines in a century, nearly all local, immunity from death being generally secured by the universal habit of hoarding in advance for lean years. But as a result of English methods, and especially the taxation and extortion, which have made hoarding im- possible, in the nineteenth century there were five famines in the first quarter, causing about 1,000,000 deaths; two in the second, causing about 500,000; six in the third, with 5,000,000 recorded deaths; and from 1876 to 1900 eighteen, in which about 26,000,000 died. His maps, showing progressive area and seventy, are appall- ing. He intimates that the actual number of deaths have been far greater than the above figures, and gives painful details of localities Prosperous " British India. London, 1901, p. 661, 702 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE where, despite the vaunted English Famine Code, " the people died like flies." Indeed, very rarely do the masses of the people off the lines of common travel have enough to eat even in seasons of plenty. During the ten years 1891-1900, 19,000,000 deaths by famine occurred in India, while in all the world, during one hundred and seven years ending in 1900, the deaths by war were only estimated as 5,000,000. In India the old law of Manu levied on a sliding scale paid after the crop was taken each year, large if the crop was good and zero if it was a failure, which comes about once in five years. The English thought they knew better and struck an average for all years, exacting a tax when there is no crop at all. Moreover, " the meshes of the great fiscal net " are made smaller and smaller until " we are now taxing the rag which the wretched peasant wraps about his loins, and en- forcing a salt tax at a rate of four thousand per cent." l This shows Mill's meaning when he said that the despotism of a free country over a conquered state can easily become the worst of all because exercised at a distance and in ignorance of the facts. Famine in India comes on the average with more or less severity about once in five years, and should be provided for better than by the farcical famine fund, which the English Government in India has expended in the vicious expedition to Chitral, and later lets its subjects stretch its skeleton hands to the world.
The Indian Office expends £16,000,000 in England, and the total English land tax is not quite sufficient to support this absentee land- lordism. The charge so often made, that the natives still hoard, is over- whelmingly refuted. Lord Curzon's figures state that the average in- come of the people is forty shillings per year, but the results of a more careful examination of official figures show it to be only twenty-two shillings. By insisting upon the use of British-made fabrics and other goods, which can be supplied cheaper, many native industries have been killed. Again, the Government has put money into railroads, because these have yielded a more immediate return, instead of devel- oping irrigation, the practicability of which has been abundantly proven, and which would be for the good of the natives. Without going into detail, if Digby is right, rents have enormously increased; foreign rule is a growing scourge; vast currents of wealth flow into England; the prosperity of India is English and not Indian; visitors only see the Anglo-Indian colonies and not real India; the eulogies of moral and material welfare in the Blue Books apply only to Anglo- stan and not to Hindustan; nearly ninety-nine per cent of the gross produce is taken for rent by landlords, who pay one-half to the British Government; official publications are pitfalls for the unwary, and many instances of untrustworthy official figures are shown; the real yield in all India together is barely two-thirds the estimated yield; and the writers that claim unstinted praise for England for the grow-