The Oregon daily journal., July 28, 1907, Page 38, Image 38

-THE ,; OREGON.. SUNDAY JOURNAL.: PORTLAND,
AY .-MORNING, jWTf 2..J)7.
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rS OUR White Man's art a superficial,
inadequate thing, after all?
We paint and model with the
excellent tools and mediums that an age of
invention makes possible and for whatt
. Principally to imitate nature, which cannot
be improved upon.
Would it be more poetic, more roman-
tic, to revert to those curious symbolisms
and crude expressions by which primitive
peoples sought, not pictorial effects, but to
tell wonderful stories, to lead one into fairy
pastures of ethereal splendor, where only
the keen of mind, the pure of soul, may
graze f
In a word, is aboriginal art superior to
civilized artf
Ten years Angel Decora, a Winne
bago, Sioux girl, studied under leading
patnters and sculptors men like Pyle and
2)r Camp and Grayson trying hard to see
art in their way, and then cried in despera
tion: "Away with your White Man's art;
our primittve way was best."
Moreover, she has so impressed the
white fathers sitting in Washington who
: ere charged with the care of our swarthy
guards, that she has been assigned to revive
. native Indian art in the United States at
f government expense,
And this she is doing at the Carlisle,
Pa., Indian School. .
F
OR many years, in fact ever since the
government has come to admit that a
good Indian need not necessarily be a
dead one. we have relicrioualv. conaiHtant.
;ly sought to turn the Indian away from his
primeval instincts, to make him do everything
the White Man'a way. .
But now comes one of the most brilliant,
most progressive of the red race, with the au
'thority of the government behind her. and says:
"Ifou can never compensate my people for
what you have taken from them. Like the bau
bles you have given them for the treasures of
their handicraft, you now offer them a paltry
civilization, with its vices and deceits and its .
dollar stamp, jrad in exchange take their poetry,
their romance, their art,things utterly beyond
value."
When Angel Decora, after ten years of
f aithful effort to accommodate, herself to mod
ern art, went to Washington and laid her case
before Francis E. Leupp, Commissioner of In
dian Affairs, he was so won by her plea that he
sent her to the Indian School at Carlisle, Pa.,
with a special commission to revive native art.
Not that the commissioner was convinced
of its superiority, but he believes in preserving
all that is good, and saw slipping away a thing
which, once gone, America would always mourn.
?n$ :m It was very much as if we as A nation had
loBt our A a U's and all that goes to make up
our education, and a great teacher came, with
out chart or book or slate, and said i "Search
your soul, and see whether the instinct that is in
you cannot call back what is gone." "
Of all the hundreds of students at Carlisle
not one has been initiated into the mysteries of ,t
the old picture writings. Yet their soul-yearn- -1
ings, their hereditary ambitions, their very phys- f
ical inclinations, all urge them back, all seek ex, 1
pression far'some way different from what they
see all about them.
And the method of the Indian teacher has
been to gather about her these grown children,
ito place in their hands the crude tools and ma- '
ftenals that their forbears of wigwam days
lused, and to say: 'Here, take them and build;
build anything you please; but put your soul
into it, and make it beautiful."
' What do they make? A casual glance about
that ig studio at Carlisle reveals only some
partly famshed rugs on frames, doilies and sofa -pillow
tops decorated with queer triangular de
signs in silk thread, picture frames hand-carved
In the same odd designs, waste paper baskets,
J pencil boxes, glove boxes, various articles of
1 every-day use, all decorated by water colors in
! the curious picture writings.
' i,"31 ar Bhould M combined with utility."
said Miss Decora recently. This is whv
m the Japanese art is acknowledged by critics to
. be the greatest in the world because it is part
.jot the people's life, because they wish to make
artistic everything that they use, not for lucre
or fame, but because; their souls cry out for
artistic expression.-, - .
"It needs no argument from me to tell yon
that the white man does not so. His home is a
ehrine to commercialism not to art"
Tor herself she seems to desire no commen
dation, no notice ehe is of the shrinking, bash
IJ. tstura ciaracterizius (h Indian jremaa but
inadequate thing, after all? . . ' 'X'. J t .V "jfHVr 1 ' - V
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for the great principle behind her she loves to '
intercede.
"Don't think we Indians do not love nature,"
she went. on. "We think her so grand that an
attempt to counterfeit her on canvas oirln any
medium seems an insult, and, , besides, what is
the use, while we have nature herself t
"But the domain of the mind ah, .that is
what we make it, and its bounds are limitless.
You look at, say, a moccasin covered with beads,
a basket, a blanket, or a rug, and say, 'Isn't it
pretty?' with a patronizing thought of the pa
tience required by the Indian in making it.
"You have missed its real significance, how
ever. You cannot see the story that is told by
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tifywthe least important thing used in his daily
e' For another
to a cradle made by an Indian mother When
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ffE.mhi the cradle for her own
child, nd into its decoration weaves h)r mother
loveyher hope, her joy. - . ,a um
thatlhLXTadlTment8
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A round ornament near the- to? of th cradle
represents the skull or head of a child . A lonfl
ornament, consisting of two strips of hide con
nected by quill-wrapped strips in colors, repre
sents the child's hair. At the lower part ars
long quill-covered thongs, representing ribs.
Then there are strips to stand for legs. Bed
represents blood, black the hair of youth, whit
that of age. Of the sticks forming the frame
work inside the cradle one is peeled, the other
unpeeled.. The unpeeled one denotes that the
child is yet helpless, undeveloped; the peeled
one hints at its subsequent mors polished condition.
There are hundreds of these symbolisms. It
is impossible in brief spaoe to explain, more than
a few. ' v
Some of the most used are the simple cbr-
actets denoting a person, the heart and lungmJ
the head, the eye, the human tradk and the buf
falo track, the eagle and thunderbird. the snake
and lizard, the fish, butterfly, cattle track, moun
tain, river, spring, etc
They look so simple, these markings, and
yet one without these centuries of intuition bads
of him could not decipher tnem or maxe tnexa.
There came a little Arapahoe girl to the
school the other day and entered Miss DeooraVJ
class. "What can you maker; she was asked.
Rha wmlied that she didnt know.
With a piece of paper and some ooloredl
crayons she set to work, and in a utue wnue naa
made a design for ft rug, whioh she bashfully
showed. She had used neither ruler nor ooxn
pass none of these artists stoops to mechanical
aids and yet she had a very well-balanced crea
tion, with its centerpiece, its border design and
its various strips and sections accurately drawnvj
But best of all, Miss Decora discovered
in it a beautiful story it was made up of over
a dozen varieties of sign writing and it needed
no words to tell her what it represented
It brought tears to her eyes, for it told her
that the new little pupil already lored her. How
did it tell this!
The outer border design was made up 01 me
lightning symbol a zig-zag lineand the very,
, center contained the figure of the mythical thun
derbird. '
Now, this little pupil was of the Mghtninat
tribe, and Miss Decora is of the thunderbird)
tribe.. So the outer design encompassing the.
inner one bespoke a real lorn 1
Then there is a Pueblo boy who came and
was told to follow his own natural inclination.
And the first thing he did was to sit down and
draw rapidly, with colored crayons, a sort of
prehistorio monster with yellow scales all over
its body and a great tail forked at the end and
blue wings and a frightful looking head with
fangs protruding. '
About the nearest thing one oould liken it
to would be a Chinese dragon.
, The boy explained that the scribe of the
Pueblo village where he dwelt had once drawn;
it for lum, that it had been painted ages and
ages ago a the walls of a cavern where tribal)
ceremonies are held, and that there was a won
derful story about it But what that story ii
he wouldn't teH-4hat was the secret of his1
people. ,
Tothe Jamestown Exposition Miss Decors
has taken some- examples of the work, and to the
Pacific slope has Bent others. '
Misi Decora wis born on a reservation of
the Winnebago Sfoux, thirty miles from Sioux I
City, fti a wigwam, and when she was yet a child j
was picked up by a stranger near her home and
taken for a long ride in the steam cars.
When she hunted up her mother in later life (
she was told that her parents had not given any '
one permission to take her, so she must have
been, stolen. Anyway, she found herself at
Hampton, Va., where she remained in the Indian!
School a few years, then went to the Northamp-'
ocflool a lew years, men weut to vuo iwuimuv
ton,School for7 Girl's in Massachusetts, and then
to SmColk
fcel sSffiShiai6 lX'
ivate
' OnFoi the greatest artists under whom she.
worked for a long time was Howard Py e, and
S tSntVo
fojdT. Grayson, the sculptor Graiy and D. W.
' Then she went to Boston and studied with'
Joseph De Camp. Edna 0. TarbeU and Benson.
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