an perceive a
spectacle we shall not see the equal of in history again. It would
help at least a little toward proving to the world around us that we
are not so young a country as we might seem, nor yet as diffident as
our national attitude would seem to indicate. The smile alone of the
redman is the light of our rivers, plains, canyons, and mountains. He
has the calm of all our native earth. It is from the earth all things
arise. It is our geography that makes us Americans of the present,
children. We are the product of a day. The redman is the product of
withered ages. He has written and is still writing a very impressive
autograph on the waste places of history. It would seem to me to be a
sign of modernism in us to preserve the living esthetic splendors in
our midst. Every other nation has preserved its inheritances. We need
likewise to do the same. It is not enough to put the redman as a
specimen under glass along with the auk and the dinosaur. He is still
alive and longing to live. We have lost the buffalo and the beaver and
we are losing the redman, also, and all these are fine symbols of our
own native richness and austerity. The redman will perpetuate himself
only by the survival of his own customs for he will never be able to
accept customs that are as foreign to him as ours are and must always
be; he will never be able to accept a culture which is inferior to his
own.

In the esthetic sense alone, then, we have the redman as a gift. As
Americans we should accept the one American genius we possess, with
genuine alacrity. We have upon our own soil something to show the
world as our own, while it lives. To restrict the redman now would
send him to an unrighteous oblivion. He has at least two contributions
to confer, a very aristocratic notion of religion, and a superb gift
for stylistic expression. He is the living artist in our midst, and we
need not think of him as merely the anthropological variation or as an
archaeological diversion merely. He proves the importance of
synthetic registration in peoples. He has created his system for
himself, from substance on, through outline down to every convincing
detail. We are in a position always of selecting details in the hope
of constructing something usable for ourselves. It is the superficial
approach. We are imitators because we have by nature or force of
circumstance to follow, and improve upon, if we can. We merely
"impose" something. We can not improve upon wh