Blackfoot Lodge Tales | Page 2

by one set of
men upon another. In a similar way the Southern Utes were recently
induced to consent to give up their reservation for another.
Americans are a conscientious people, yet they take no interest in these
frauds. They have the Anglo-Saxon spirit of fair play, which
sympathizes with weakness, yet no protest is made against the
oppression which the Indian suffers. They are generous; a famine in
Ireland, Japan, or Russia arouses the sympathy and calls forth the
bounty of the nation, yet they give no heed to the distress of the Indians,
who are in the very midst of them. They do not realize that Indians are
human beings like themselves.
For this state of things there must be a reason, and this reason is to be
found, I believe, in the fact that practically no one has any personal
knowledge of the Indian race. The few who are acquainted with them
are neither writers nor public speakers, and for the most part would find
it easier to break a horse than to write a letter. If the general public
knows little of this race, those who legislate about them are equally

ignorant. From the congressional page who distributes the copies of a
pending bill, up through the representatives and senators who vote for it,
to the president whose signature makes the measure a law, all are
entirely unacquainted with this people or their needs.
Many stories about Indians have been written, some of which are
interesting and some, perhaps, true. All, however, have been written by
civilized people, and have thus of necessity been misleading. The
reason for this is plain. The white person who gives his idea of a story
of Indian life inevitably looks at things from the civilized point of view,
and assigns to the Indian such motives and feelings as govern the
civilized man. But often the feelings which lead an Indian to perform a
particular action are not those which would induce a white man to do
the same thing, or if they are, the train of reasoning which led up to the
Indian's motive is not the reasoning of the white man.
In a volume about the Pawnees,[1] I endeavored to show how Indians
think and feel by letting some of them tell their own stories in their own
fashion, and thus explain in their own way how they look at the
every-day occurrences of their life, what motives govern them, and
how they reason.
[Footnote 1: Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales.]
In the present volume, I treat of another race of Indians in precisely the
same way. I give the Blackfoot stories as they have been told to me by
the Indians themselves, not elaborating nor adding to them. In all cases
except one they were written down as they fell from the lips of the
storyteller. Sometimes I have transposed a sentence or two, or have
added a few words of explanation; but the stories as here given are told
in the words of the original narrators as nearly as it is possible to render
those words into the simplest every-day English. These are Indians'
stories, pictures of Indian life drawn by Indian artists, and showing this
life from the Indian's point of view. Those who read these stories will
have the narratives just as they came to me from the lips of the Indians
themselves; and from the tales they can get a true notion of the real
man who is speaking. He is not the Indian of the newspapers, nor of the
novel, nor of the Eastern sentimentalist, nor of the Western boomer, but
the real Indian as he is in his daily life among his own people, his
friends, where he is not embarrassed by the presence of strangers, nor
trying to produce effects, but is himself--the true, natural man.

And when you are talking with your Indian friend, as you sit beside
him and smoke with him on the bare prairie during a halt in the day's
march, or at night lie at length about your lonely camp fire in the
mountains, or form one of a circle of feasters in his home lodge, you
get very near to nature. Some of the sentiments which he expresses may
horrify your civilized mind, but they are not unlike those which your
own small boy might utter. The Indian talks of blood and wounds and
death in a commonplace, matter-of-fact way that may startle you. But
these things used to be a part of his daily life; and even to-day you may
sometimes hear a dried-up, palsied survivor of the ancient wars cackle
out his shrill laugh when he tells as a merry jest, a bloodcurdling story
of the torture he inflicted on some enemy in the long