THE RED MAN’S FAITH

Shannon News, 29 December 1925, Page 3

THE RED MAN’S FAITH

OLD RELIGIOUS BELIEFS. CONFLICT WITH AUTHORITY

Ancient signal tires are burning and long-silet drums are booming on the Pueblo Indian reservation, m New Mexico. For the first time in generations, the Red Man has refused to obey the “Great White Father in Washington.. Th- Department ot the Interior and the Commission of In. dian Affairs have issued orders demanding that the Pueblos their old religion with its weird re. ligious dances. . , . - ' Through a council of their chiefs and tribal governors, the Indians have answered, and the substance o their answer is "Yo u can punish us you can put us in jail, you can kil us, you can wipe us out and destroy usr —but so long as we live can never make us do this thing. If y° persist in your order we declare war. We are too weak for physical battle. We know that our arrows.and tomahawks are futile against your machine.guns and cannon. Rut we will go to war with vou in the cour. <■ S B ht you 10 the end. We prefer the Happy Hunting Ground to the Heaven of our white brothers, golden streets of your Heaven would soon wear out .our moccasins, and the jewelled walls.of your New Jerusalem would be only a prison ror our souls.”' , Powerful Aid for ludiaas.

The formal refusal of the Pueblos, couched in more legal language has been received in Washington and has created an acute problem. It is complicated by the fact that powerful individuals and influences have rusned to the defence Of the Indians. Influ. ential society women, artists, literary persons, distinguished ethnologists, and the American Museum of Natui.. al History, have all come into the fi"ht to preserve the ancient traditions and tribal dances of the Indians They demand their preservation On the grounds of art, bea,uty, history, morals and religious libeitv. The dances and ceremonials which the Indian Commission seeks to abolish include The Eagle Dance, the Corn Dance, the Rain Dance, the Sun Dance ,and a number of other weird mystical ceremonies which date back, in costumes and ritual, to u time long before Columbus discovered America and perhaps to , a time which antedates Christianity. The principal order which seeks to abolish these ancient ceremonies attacks them directly. It has been the custom of the Pueblos to take a cer. tain number of boys out of the public schools for a year, to train them intensively in the. old rituals and make them priests. mission has ordered this custom to be abolished.

Allegation and Denial. Mr. Charles H. Burke, the United States Indian Commissioner, has said " Until the old customs and Indian practices are broken up among these people we cannot hope' for -a. great amount of progress. The secret dance is perhaps one of the greatesl evils. What goes on, 1 will not 'attempt to say, but I firmly believe that it is little less than a ribald system ol debauchery.” The Pueblo chiefs in their format declaration denounce this staement as “Shamefully untrue,” and call upon the testimony of white scholars and artists who 'have seen the dances. As a matter of fact, the dances themselves are not secret ,as they have practically all been seen and even photographed by artists and sci. entists, who declare that they have ‘‘great primitive strength and beauty, and ethnological and historical value that cannot be overestimated.” In practically none of the dances Is there any mingling or contact of the sexes, and. though some of them are danced in a semi.nude state, with weird costumes and with a great violence and abandon, it is the abandon of religious fervour rather, than of physical debauchery . The symbolic and esoteric meaning of the dances however, Is kept secret, handed down by word of mouth only, from generation to generation, by the speciallytrained priests to their disciples. Statement Ql Teachings.

The nearest approach to a revela, turn of what this secret teaching con. sists of has just ..been made in the following, an authorised, statement which is now published for the first time. ‘‘The religious schooling of these boy priests is strict in discipline and arduous. One of the old Taos rituals has approximately 18,000 words, which are committed tp memory in' their proper sequence. The memorising is done entirely by word of mouth. Our unwritten Bible 1 which is the subject of this memorising has been handed down from time immemorial. Its truths, so far as they, have been pierced by outsiders, are classified by the Smithsonian Institution gs ‘nature poetry.’ ” The chief ritual which these neophytes learn by heart, and which is symbolised in the dances, tells of the migration of the Taos people from \ the north; of how they were guided by Divine providence through the mountains, until at last two angels, sent put by the sun, met the chief who was leading the Taos, and gave them cars of yellow black, red and blue corn. The ritual goes on to relate how another angel came down from the western universe and gave the Taos chief beautiful shells frpm the Pacific Ocean. These shells are used in Indian art and dances to re. present the watery of the earth.

The statement proceeds; “The Indian youth who learns by heart the beautiful Nature epic of his own people and the ceremonies and dances which perpetuate it, is receiving a training to which the humdrum of Government Indian schools offers a weak comparison. The religious beliefs and ceremonies and forms of prayer of our Pueblos are as old as the* world, and they are holy. Our

happiness, our moral behaviour,^ are dependent on their continuation. Fight on Legal Grounds. • These Indian chiefs, some of them cuite well educated in the knowledge of the white man as well as.theh own are too. shrewd to make their fight on purely moral and academic grounds. They demand legal protect,on and quote the Constitution of the L nit cl States and the treaty under vhtch New Mexico came into the Lulled States. The first says: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishments of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. ’ The treaty says of all the inhabitants of New Mexico: “They shall be secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction. I er^ toleration of religious sentiment shall be scoured, and no inhabitant of this State shall bo molested m person or property on account of _Ms or her mode of religious worship. The Indians allege that the policy of the Indian Commission has been influenced by missionaries, chiefly Baptist and Methodist, who object to any religion that has “wild and partially nude dances as a part of its ceremonial.’'