e of the typical American
Indian as it was before he knew the white man. I have long wished to do
this, because I cannot find that it has ever been seriously, adequately,
and sincerely done. The religion of the Indian is the last thing about
him that the man of another race will ever understand.

First, the Indian does not speak of these deep matters so long as
he believes in them, and when he has ceased to believe he speaks
inaccurately and slightingly.

Second, even if he can be induced to speak, the racial and religious
prejudice of the other stands in the way of his sympathetic
comprehension.

Third, practically all existing studies on this subject have been made
during the transition period, when the original beliefs and philosophy
of the native American were already undergoing rapid disintegration.

There are to be found here and there superficial accounts of strange
customs and ceremonies, of which the symbolism or inner meaning was
largely hidden from the observer; and there has been a great deal of
material collected in recent years which is without value because it is
modern and hybrid, inextricably mixed with Biblical legend and Caucasian
philosophy. Some of it has even been invented for commercial purposes.
Give a reservation Indian a present, and he will possibly provide you
with sacred songs, a mythology, and folk-lore to order!

My little book does not pretend to be a scientific treatise. It is as
true as I can make it to my childhood teaching and ancestral ideals,
but from the human, not the ethnological standpoint. I have not cared to
pile up more dry bones, but to clothe them with flesh and blood. So much
as has been written by strangers of our ancient faith and worship
treats it chiefly as matter of curiosity. I should like to emphasize its
universal quality, its personal appeal!

The first missionaries, good men imbued with the narrowness of their
age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshipers, and demanded of us that
we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their sacred altar.
They even told us that we were eternally lost, unless we adopted a
tangible symbol and professed a particular form of their hydra-headed
faith.

We of the twentieth century know better! We know that all religious
aspiration, all sincere worship, can have but one source and one goal.
We know that the God of the lettered and the unlettered, of the Greek
and the barbarian, is after all the same God; and, like Pe