field of corn. So the play goes on--a dozen acts
typifying a dozen scenes in a single night.

Good counsel, too, they gave in those miracle plays and ceremonial
dances. "If wounded in battle, don't cry out like a child. Pull out the
arrow. Slip off and die with silence in the throat." "When you go to the
hunt, travel with a light blanket." We talk of getting back to Mother
Earth. The Indian chants endless songs to the wonder of the Great Earth
Magician, creator of life and crops. Fire, too, plays a mysterious part
in all theories of life creation; and this, too, is the subject of a
dance.

Then came dark days. Tribes from the far Athabasca came down like the
Vandals of Europe--Navajo and Apache, relentless warriors. From Great
Houses the people of the Southwest retired to cliffs and caves. When the
Spaniards came with firearms and horses, the situation was almost one of
extermination for the sedentary Indians; and they retired to such
heights as the high mesas of the Tusayan Desert. Whether when white man
stopped raid by the warlike tribes, it was better or worse for the
peaceful Pima and Papago and Moki, it is hard to say; for the white man
began to take the Indian's water and the Indian's land. It's a story of
slow tragedy here. In the days of the overland rush to California, when
every foot of the trail was beset by Apache and Navajo, it was the Pima
and Papago offered shelter and protection to the white overlander. What
does the Indian know of "prior rights" in filing for water? Have not
these waters been his since the days of his forefathers, when men came
with their families from the Morning Glow to the box-canyons of the Gila
and Frijoles? If prior rights mean anything, has not the Pima prior
rights by ten thousand years? But the Pima has not a little slip of
government paper called a deed. The big irrigation companies have tapped
the streams above the Indian Reserve; and the waters have been diverted.
They don't come to the Indians any more. All the Indian gets is the
overflow of the torrential rains--that only brings the alkali wash to
the surface of the land and does not flush it off. The Pima can no
longer raise crops. Slowly and very surely, he is being reduced to
starvation in a country overflowing with plenty, in a country which has
taken his land and his waters, in a country whose people he loyally
protected as they crossed the continent to California.

What are the American people going to do about it?