Adventures in the Arts | Page 9

the ineffable beauty of them, would want at least to avail ourselves of a feast for the eye which no other country in existence can offer us, and which any other nation in the world would be only too proud to cherish and foster.
We are not, I think, more than vaguely conscious of what we possess in these redman festivities, by way of esthetic prize. It is with pain that one hears rumors of official disapproval of these rare and invaluable ceremonials. Those familiar with human psychology understand perfectly that the one necessary element for individual growth is freedom to act according to personal needs. Once an opposition of any sort is interposed, you get a blocked aspect of evolution, you get a withered branch, and it may even be a dead root. All sorts of complexes and complexities occur. You get deformity, if not complete helplessness and annihilation. I can not imagine what would happen to the redman if his one racial gesture were denied him, if he were forbidden to perform his symbolic dances from season to season. It is a survival that is as spiritually imperative to him as it is physically and emotionally necessary. I can see a whole flood of exquisite inhibitions heaped up for burial and dry rot within the caverns and the interstices of his soul. He is a rapidly disappearing splendor, despite the possible encouragement of statistics. He needs the dance to make his body live out its natural existence, precisely as he needs the air for his lungs and blood for his veins. He needs to dance as we need to laugh to save ourselves from fixed stages of morbidity and disintegration. It is the laughter of his body that he insists upon, as well as depends upon. A redman deprived of his racial gesture is unthinkable. You would have him soon the bleached carcass in the desert out of which death moans, and from which the lizard crawls. It would be in the nature of direct race suicide. He needs protection therefore rather than disapproval. It is as if you clipped the wing of the eagle, and then asked him to soar to the sun, to cut a curve on the sky with the instrument dislodged; or as if you asked the deer to roam the wood with its cloven hoofs removed. You can not cut the main artery of the body and expect it to continue functioning. Depriving the redman of his one enviable gesture would be cutting the artery of racial instinct, emptying the beautiful chamber of his soul of its enduring consciousness. The window would be opened and the bird flown to a dead sky. It is simply unthinkable. The redman is essentially a thankful and a religious being. He needs to celebrate the gifts his heaven pours upon him. Without them he would in short perish, and perish rapidly, having no breath to breathe, and no further need for survival. He is already in process of disappearance from our midst, with the attempts toward assimilation.
Inasmuch as we have the evidence of a fine aristocracy among us still, it would seem as if it behooved us as a respectable host to let the redman guest entertain himself as he will, as he sublimely does, since as guardians of such exceptional charges we can not seem to entertain them. There is no logical reason why they should accept an inferior hospitality, other than with the idea of not inflicting themselves upon a strange host more than is necessary. The redman in the aggregate is an example of the peaceable and unobtrusive citizen; we would not presume to interfere with the play of children in the sunlight. They are among the beautiful children of the world in their harmlessness. They are among the aristocracy of the world in the matters of ethics, morals, and etiquette. We forget they are vastly older, and in symbolic ways infinitely more experienced than ourselves. They do not share in tailor-made customs. They do not need imposed culture, which is essentially inferior to their own. Soon we shall see them written on tablets of stone, along with the Egyptians and the others among the races that have perished. The esthetics of the redman have been too particular to permit of universal understanding, and of universal adaptation. It is the same with all primitives, who invent regimes and modes of expression for themselves according to their own specific psychological needs. We encourage every other sign and indication of beauty toward the progress of perfection. Why should not we encourage a race that is beautiful by the proof of centuries to remain the unoffensive guest of the sun and the moon and the stars while they may? As the infant prodigy among races, there is much