The Native Bolivian

The Indian of the Bolivian plateau is still only a half-civilized man and less than half a Christian. He retains his primeval Nature worship, which groups together the spirits that dwell in mountains, rivers, and rocks with the spirits of his ancestors, revering and propitiating all as Achachilas. In the same ceremony his medicine man invokes the Christian “Dios” to favor the building of a house, or whatever he undertakes, and simultaneously invokes the Achachilas, propitiating them also by offerings, the gift made to the Earth Spirit being buried in the soil. Similarly he retains the ceremonial dances of heathendom, and has secret dancing guilds, of whose mysteries the white man can learn nothing.

His morality is what it was, in theory and practice, four centuries ago. He neither loves nor hates, but fears, the white man, and the white man neither loves nor hates, but despises him; there being some fear mingled with the contempt. Intermarriage between pure Indians and pure Europeans is very uncommon. They are held together neither by social relations nor by political, but by the need which the white landowner has for the Indian’s labor and by the power of long habit, which has made the Indian acquiesce in his subjection as a rent payer.

Neither of them ever refers to the Spanish Conquest. The white man does not honor the memory of Pizarro; to the Indian the story is too dim and distant to affect his mind. Nor is it the least remarkable feature of the situation that the mestizo, or half-breed, forms no link between the races. He prefers to speak Spanish which the Indian rarely understands. He is held to belong to the upper race, which is, for social and political purpose, though not by right of numbers, the Peruvian or Bolivian nation.

JAMES BRYCE.

From “South America, Observations and Impressions.”