. It seems that the women are naturally chaste. For
there is no conventional standard among their own people by which they
are judged. If an unmarried squaw has a child, there are deploring
clucks, but the girl's parents care tenderly for the little one and its
advent makes no difference in the mother's chances for a good marriage.
Also the child does not suffer socially for its unfortunate birth, which
is more humane at least than our method of treating such children. The
children of a marriage take the mother's name and belong to her clan.
She has absolute control of them until the girl reaches a marriageable
age; then Dad collects the marriage price.

Another thing we civilized parents might take into consideration. Indian
babies are never punished by beating or shaking. It is the Indian idea
that anything which injures a child's self-respect is very harmful. Yet
Indian children are very well-behaved, and their respect and love for
their elders is a beautiful thing. I have never seen an Indian child cry
or sulk for anything forbidden it.

Schools for Reservation children are compulsory, but whether they are
altogether a blessing or not is still doubtful. To take an Indian child
away from its own free, wild life, teach it to dress in white man's
clothes, eat our food, sleep in our beds, bathe in white-tiled bathtubs,
think our thoughts, learn our vices, and then, having led them to
despise their own way of living, send them back to their people who have
not changed while their children were being literally reborn--what does
this accomplish? Doesn't Aesop tell us something of a crow that would be
a dove and found himself an outcast everywhere? We are replacing the
beautiful symbolism of the Indian by our materialism and leaving him
bewildered and discouraged. Why should he be taught to despise his
hogan, shaped after the beautiful rounded curve of the rainbow and the
arched course of the sun in his daily journey across the sky--a type of
home that has been his for generations? Do we ever stop to think why the
mud hut is dome-shaped, why the door always faces the east?

I have been watching one Hopi family for years. In this case simple
housekeeping, plain sewing, and suitable cooking have been taught to the
girl in school. The mother waits eagerly for the return of the daughter
from school so that she can hear and learn and share what has been
taught to her girl. Her efforts to keep pace with the child are so
intense