LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER I

       The Land Wisdom of the Indians

       In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

      —D. H. LAWRENCE (at Taos)

      There are, today, a few wilderness reaches on the North American continent—in Alaska, in Canada, and in the high places of the Rocky Mountains—where the early-morning mantle of primeval America can be seen in its pristine glory, where one can gaze with wonder on the land as it was when the Indians first came. Geologically and geographically this continent was, and is, a masterpiece. With its ideal latitude and rich resources, the two-billion-acre expanse that became the United States was the promised land for active men.

      The American continent was in a state of climax at the time of the first Indian intrusions ten millennia or more ago. Superlatives alone could describe the bewildering abundance of flora and fauna that enlivened its landscapes: the towering redwoods, the giant saguaro cacti, the teeming herds of buffalo, the beaver, and the grass were, of their kind, unsurpassed.

      The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth, and the native American shared this elemental ethic: the land was alive to his loving touch, and he, its son, was brother to all creatures. His feelings were made visible in medicine bundles and dance rhythms for rain, and all of his religious rites and land attitudes savored the inseparable world of nature and God, the Master of Life. During the long Indian tenure the land remained undefiled save for scars no deeper than the scratches of cornfield clearings or the farming canals of the Hohokams on the Arizona desert.

      There was skill in gardening along with this respect for the earth, and when Sir Walter Raleigh’s colonists came warily ashore on the Atlantic Coast, Indians brought them gifts of melons and grapes. In Massachusetts, too, Indians not only schooled the Pilgrims in the culture of maize and squashes, but taught them how to fertilize the hills with alewives from the tidal creeks. The Five Nations and the Algonquians of the Northeast; the Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, and Seminoles of the South; the village-dwelling Mandans of the Missouri River country; the Pueblos of Hopi, Zuni, and the Rio Grande; and the Pima of the Southwest, all put the earth to use and made it bring forth fruit. Their implements were Stone Age, but most tribes were acquiring the rudiments of a higher civilization. They were learning how to secure a surplus from the earth, and were beginning to in-vest it in goods, tools, and buildings, and to devote their leisure hours to craft and artwork and to the creation of religious rites and political systems.

      The idea has long been implanted in our thinking that all American Indians belonged to nomadic bands that developed neither title to, nor ties with, the land. This is misconceived history, for even the tribes that were not village dwellers, tending garden plots of com, beans, or cotton, had stretches of land they regarded as their own. But there was a subtle qualification. The land and the Indians were bound together by the ties of kinship and nature, rather than by an understanding of property ownership. “The land is our mother,” said Iroquois tradition, said the Midwest Sauk and Foxes, said the Northwest Nez Perces of Chief Joseph. The com, fruits, roots, fish, and game were to all tribes the gifts which the Earth Mother gave freely to her children. And with that conception, the Indian’s emotional attachment for his woods, valleys, and prairies was the very essence of life.

      The depth of this feeling is reflected in the Navajos, who scorned the rich Oklahoma prairie country offered them by the government, and chose to live in their own arid and rugged deserts. It is reflected also in the Cherokees who, in the space of one generation, changed their whole way of fife, established schools and libraries, produced an alphabet, planned a constitution and a legislature, and went to work in their own mills and blacksmith shops—all with the purpose of becoming so civilized that the whites would allow them to stay on their own lands and not ship them west to the Territories.

      To the Indian, the homeland was the center of the universe. No member of a civilized people ever spoke of his native land with more pride than is apparent in the speech of the Crow Chief, Arapooish: “The Crow country,” he said, “is exactly in the right place. It has snowy mountains and sunny plains; all kinds of climates and good things for every season. When the summer heat scorches the prairies, you can draw up under the mountains, where the air is sweet and cool, the grass fresh, and the bright streams come tumbling out of the snowbanks. There you can hunt the elk, the deer, and the antelope, when their skins are fit for dressing; there you will find plenty of white bears and mountain sheep.

      “In the autumn, when your horses are fat and strong from the mountain pastures, you can go down into the plains and hunt the buffalo, or trap beaver in the streams. And when winter comes on, you can take shelter in the woody bottoms

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