possible and
from whom I have exacted no wish save that I might always love someone
or something that was so like herself as to make me think it was no
other than herself. It is because I love the idea of life better than
anything else that I believe most of all in the magic of existence,
and in spite of much terrifying and disillusioning experience of late,
I _believe_.

PART ONE

THE RED MAN

It is significant that all races, and primitive peoples especially,
exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe their racial autograph before
they depart. It is our redman who permits us to witness the signing of
his autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in the form of
the symbolic dance which he and his forefathers have practiced through
the centuries, making the name America something to be remembered
among the great names of the world and of time. It is the redman who
has written down our earliest known history, and it is of his symbolic
and esthetic endeavors that we should be most reasonably proud. He is
the one man who has shown us the significance of the poetic aspects of
our original land. Without him we should still be unrepresented in the
cultural development of the world. The wide discrepancies between our
earliest history and our present make it an imperative issue for
everyone loving the name America to cherish him while he remains among
us as the only esthetic representative of our great country up to the
present hour. He has indicated for all time the symbolic splendor of
our plains, canyons, mountains, lakes, mesas and ravines, our forests
and our native skies, with their animal inhabitants, the buffalo, the
deer, the eagle and the various other living presences in their midst.
He has learned throughout the centuries the nature of our soil and has
symbolized for his own religious and esthetic satisfaction all the
various forms that have become benefactors to him.

Americans of this time and of time to come shall know little or
nothing of their spacious land until they have sought some degree of
intimacy with our first artistic relative. The redman is the one truly
indigenous religionist and esthete of America. He knows every form of
animal and vegetable life adhering to our earth, and has made for
himself a series of striking pageantries in the form of stirring
dances to celebrate them, and his relation to them. Throughout the
various dances of the Pueblos of the Rio Grande those of San Fel