What the White Race May Learn from the Indian

Of all the contemptible, shuffling, and mean subterfuges the white race is capable of, this seems to me to be about the meanest and most contemptible. To pretend to believe in the dignity of labor, and then at any and all opportunities afforded to labor to dodge away and do these useless and selfish things that do not take off one ounce of the burden of physical labor we have imposed upon our fellows.

Let me not be thought for a moment to be opposed to any healthful recreation or sport. If golf be pursued as a recreation, for fun, I am heartily in accord with it and its promoters. It is when it is taken as an “exercise,” as a substitute for honest and useful labor, that I protest against it, as a fraud, a delusion, a snare, and a contemptible subterfuge. If you want real exercise, real work, go and relieve some poor fellow-man of his excess of hard work. Tell him you have come to give him an hour’s rest, that he may go and study nature, go and look at the flowers of your garden, wander into the woods and hear the birds sing, or visit the public library and read some entertaining and instructive book. If you are too ashamed to openly try to give an hour or two of rest and change to your “brother” man, go and chop the wood for the house, dig up the potato patch, wheel out the manure from the stable, or do some other useful and beneficial thing. Pleasure is pleasure, sport is sport, fun is fun, but to engage in these sports seriously, as a physical exercise to counteract the effects of your evil dietetic habits or other grossnesses, is to add hypocrisy and subterfuge to evil living.

What labor the Indian has to do he does gladly, cheerfully, openly. He is not ashamed to have soiled hands or to be caught in the act. In this I am heartily in accord with him. If I ever wrote a creed one of the first articles of my religion would be: “I believe in the benefit and joy of physical labor.” If I had my way I would compel every member of the so-called “learned” professions (!), from preacher to lawyer, teacher and doctor, statesman, politician, and bartender, to spend not less than three hours at hard physical labor every day, and as for my brother preachers, I would put them to road-making every Monday, for half the day at least, so that by practical knowledge of road-making on earth they might be better able to preach to their congregations the following Sunday about the road to heaven. There is nothing that more reveals that we are a people of caste and class than the attitude of the rich and the “learned” toward physical labor. I am not in sympathy with that attitude in any respect; I despise, hate, loathe it, and would see it changed. To the Indian, for his honest respect for and indulgence in physical labor, I give my adherence and honor.

CHAPTER IX
THE INDIAN AND PHYSICAL LABOR FOR GIRLS AND WOMEN

In the preceding chapter I have given the Indian’s life, habit, thought, towards physical labor for himself and his sons. He holds the same attitude toward it for his daughter and his wife. And not only does he so hold it, but the wife and daughter regard it in exactly the same way. The out-door life of the Indian girl and woman makes her healthy, vigorous, muscular, and strong. She glories in her physical vigor and strength, and wonders why her white sister is not equal to her in physical capacity. When I tell her that the white women pity her because, forsooth, “she has to do so much hard work, while the lazy men sit by, smoking, and doing nothing,” she looks at me in vacant amazement. Once when I was talking in this way one of them said: “Are your white women all fools? Tell them we not only don’t need their pity, but we despise them for their habits of life that lead them to pity us. The Creator made us with the capacity and power for work. He knows that all beings must work if they would be healthy. We would be healthy, and therefore we do His will in working at our appointed tasks. We are glad and proud to do them. And as for the men: let them dare to interfere in our work and they will soon see what they will see. We brook no interference or help from them.”

So their children (girls as well as boys) are all brought up from the earliest years to work, and to work hard. Boys are sent out to herd sheep, horses, and cattle; to watch the corn and see that nothing disturbs it. And the girls, as soon as they can toddle, become “little mothers” to their younger brothers and sisters. As they grow older they grind all the corn, gather all the wild grass and other seeds, make all the basketry and pottery, and prepare all the food for the household. To grind corn in the Indian fashion, with flat rock and metate, is no easy task for a strong man of the white race, yet I have known a girl of fifteen to keep at work at the metate for ten hours a day for several days in succession, in order that there might be plenty of flour when guests came to the Snake Dance.

On one of my visits to the Hopi village of Oraibi I found the women at work building a house. This is their occupation. All labor among Hopis is divided between the sexes in accordance with long-established custom, and I think it is so divided in all aboriginal peoples. The men undertook the protection of the home (were the warriors) and the hunting of animals for food. They also make the robes and moccasins. Those tribes that lost their nomad character and became sedentary added care of the fields and the stock to the work of their men. The women practically undertook all the rest. The building of the home, its care, the general gathering of seeds, and the preparation of all foods belong to them.

And as a rule, they do their chosen or appointed or hereditary work cheerfully. They know nothing of the aches and pains of their weaker white sisters; they are as strong as men, so they have no fear of physical labor. Not only this, but they enjoy it; they go to it with pleasure, as all healthy bodies do. How often have I stood and watched a healthy, vigorous man swing a hammer at the forge, or in a mine or a trench. How easily it was done, how gladly, how unconscious of effort! To the healthy woman, with reasonable strength, labor is also a pleasure. To feel one’s self accomplishing something, and able to do it without undue fatigue or exhaustion, what a delight it is!

The woman who honors us by coming to our house weekly to do the heavy work, often reminds me of a panther. She fairly “leaps” upon her work with an exuberance of strength and spirit that is a perfect delight, in this age of woman’s physical disability and disinclination to do physical labor.

So it is with Indian women. They sing in unison when a dozen of them get together at the grinding-trough; though the work is hard enough, when long continued, to exhaust any strong man. I have seen women kneel and pound acorns all day, lifting a heavy pestle as high as their heads at every stroke. In the case of these women builders at Oraibi: they carried all the heavy rocks and put them in position, mixed their own mortar, and were their own paddies, and in everything, save the placing of the heavy crossbeams for the roof, to handle which they called upon some of the men for aid, they did all the work from beginning to end.

Now, while I do not especially want to see white women building a house, I do wish, with all my heart, that they had the physical strength to do it or similar arduous labor. I do long for the whole of my race that the women and girls shall have such vigorous health and strength that no ordinary labor could tire them.

“But,” say my white friends,—women and girls,—“we don’t want to work physically; there is no need for it; we are not strong enough to do it; we exhaust ourselves, and then do not have energy enough for the other duties of life; we engage servants to do our menial labor for us.”

Indeed! In the first place I want to protest with all the power I have against the word and idea “menial.” There is no menial service. All service, rendered in willing helpfulness and love, is dignified, noble, and ennobling. He or she who accepts service from another with the idea that the service is “menial,” thereby degrades himself, herself, far more than the person is “degraded” by the performance of the service. I would rather have my son a good scavenger, working daily to keep the city pure and clean, than be an “honored” lawyer, engaged in dishonest cases; a “successful” politician, tangled up with graft; a “popular” physician, selfishly deceiving his patients; or an “eloquent” and “dear” minister, self-righteously lauding himself and pouring forth inane platitudes in high-sounding phrases from the pulpit. “Menial service” is divine compared with these occupations when they are demoralized.

And the principle of all I have said applies to girls as well as boys. I would rather that daughters of mine should be able to scrub the floor, bake bread, do the family washing and mending, repair the boys’ clothes, knit, sew, and take care of the kitchen garden and the flowers, than strum “The Battle of Prague” or “The Maiden’s Prayer,” without feeling or expression, on a half-tuned piano. The former occupations are holy and dignified as compared with the sham exhibition of the latter. I like to see a girl with an apron on, strong, healthy, willing, useful, capable, engaged in useful household work, and if our young men had one-tenth part of the sense they ought to have, they would hunt for such girls to become their wives and the mothers of their children, rather than for the dainty, white-faced, wasp-waisted, finger-manicured dolls who are useful for no other purpose than to be looked at.

I have no desire to make pack-horses or slaves of intelligent women or girls, but I cannot help asking the question of them: “Which would you rather be, strong enough to do any and all so-called menial and laborious service, and endowed with perfect health, or be weakly and puny and live the life of ease and luxury that most women and girls seem to covet?” And upon the answer to that question should I base my judgment as to the wisdom, intelligence, and fitness for the duties of life of the answerer. There is no dignity in woman superior to the dignity of being able personally (if necessary) to care for all the physical needs of her household; there is no charm greater than the charm of strength combined with gracious, womanly sweetness exercised for the joy of others; there is no refinement greater than the refinement of a gloriously healthy woman radiating physical, mental, spiritual life upon all those who come within the sphere of her influence.

CHAPTER X
THE INDIAN AND DIET

A man is largely the result of what he eats. Indeed, many scientific specialists now tell us that sex determination is largely the result of the food eaten by the expectant mother, so that according to what the mother eats the unborn child becomes—male or female. Ploss in his well-known “Ueber die das Geschlechtsverhältniss der Kinder bedingenden Ursachen,” Düsing in his painstaking “Die Regulirung des Geschlechtsverhältnisses bei der Vernehrung der Menschen, Miere und Pflanzen,” and Westermarck in the “History of Human Marriage,” prove conclusively, from close study of actual experimentation, that the sex of the child is largely fixed by the quantity and quality of nutrition absorbed by the mother. Hence it is not too strong a statement that a man is largely the result of his (or his mother’s) food.

At first sight it will appear foolish to many of my readers to go to the Indian for ideas on diet, yet I think I can prove, more conclusively than the learned scientists whose books I have named above can prove their theories, that the Indian has many ideas on diet which the white race can learn to its great advantage.

In the first place, the normal aborigine, before he began to use the white man’s foods, was perforce compelled to live on a comparatively simple diet. His choice was limited, his cookery simple. Yet he lived in perfect health and strength. With few articles of diet, and these of the simplest character, prepared in the readiest and easiest ways, he attained a vigor, a robustness, that puts to shame the strength and power of civilized men. Why? The reasons are not far to seek. In simplicity of food there is safety. We eat not only too much, but too great variety, and every student of dietetics knows that the greater the variety the greater the possibility that too much will be eaten. The Indian, living his simple life, was compelled to be content with the maize, beans, pumpkins, and melons of his fields, the peaches of his orchards, the wild grass seeds, nuts, fruits, and roots he or his squaw could gather, and the products of his traps or the chase. Here, then, was a restricted dietary. He had not much choice, nor a large menu for each meal. The smaller the menu the less, as a rule, any person will eat, be he Indian or white man. The extended menu is a series of temptations to overeat. The simple menu of the Indian was a preventive to gluttony. It will doubtless be recalled that when the great Bismarck was broken down in health, his physicians gave him no other prescription as to food than that he should eat but one kind of food to a meal. This is a dietetic axiom: The less variety the less one eats. In a diseased condition health can often be restored by giving the stomach and assimilative organs less work to do.

Among the Indian race dyspepsia is almost unknown. To this fact that they have a small variety of foods, this healthful condition is largely attributable. On the other hand, one has but to pick up any daily newspaper to see the positive proofs of the dyspeptic condition of the “greatest nation of the world” among the white race. There are nostrums for dyspepsia without end. Syrups, pills, doses that work while you sleep, and dopes that work inside and out. Millions of dollars are annually spent merely in advertising these damnable proofs of our idiocy or gluttony, or both. A thousand nostrums flout their damned and damning lies in the faces of the “superior race”! And a drug store on every corner of our large cities demonstrates the great demand there is for these absolute proofs of our vile dietetic habits. Every pill taken, every nostrum swallowed, is a proof positive of our ignorance, or our gluttony, or our gullibility, and probably a good deal of each. Seventy-five millions of dollars were spent in 1905 in the purchase of patent medicines, every cent of which was worse than wasted.

Before the white race came and perverted—pardon me, civilized—him, what did the “uncivilized Indian” know of patent medicines? What did he know of the diseases which these nostrums are supposed to cure? Nothing! He was as ignorant of one as the other. In his native wildness he was healthy and strong; only since he has been led into evil ways by a false civilization has he so degenerated as to need such compounds.

Let us, then, forget our civilization,—this portion of it,—and forego our physical ills and our patent nostrums, and go back to a simple, natural, restricted diet. In that one course of procedure will be found more restored health than all the physicians of the world can give otherwise in a score of years. Let us learn to eat few things to a meal, and those of such a nature that they will properly mix, and thus not overtax the stomach in its work of digestion.

When I sit down to the laden tables of my rich friends, or at the tables of the first-class hotels of the country, I sometimes find my judgment stronger than my perverted appetite. At such times I look over the bill of fare. I see ten or a dozen courses, varying from cocktails, oysters, and fish to ice-cream, fruit, and wines. There are meats and vegetables, nuts and fruits, cooked and uncooked, pastries and jellies, soups and coffee, wines and spices, sauces, relishes, and seasonings galore, and I am more or less disgusted with the whole business, and eat sparingly of but two or three dishes. At other times, alas! my appetite asserts itself, and I “go the pace” with the rest. Now, when all these things, so elaborately prepared, so daintily served, so “nicely” eaten, are disposed of and in the stomach, let me ask (without any desire to offend): Is there the slightest difference in the contents of the stomach of such a person and the stomach of a hog filled with swill? In the first case there is cocktail and caviar, olives and celery, oysters and soup, fish and entremes, entree and roast, game and punch, ice-cream and cheese, pastry and fruit, nuts and crackers, with water, coffee, tea, or wine to liquefy it all, all taken separately, but now mixed in one horrible mess within, and in the case of the hog they were mixed first and swallowed mixed instead of in “courses.”

O men and women of the white race, of the superior civilization, quit such gluttony and disease-breeding courses! Get back to the Indian’s simplicity in diet. Learn the meaning of “low living and high thinking.” Stop pampering your sensual appetites and feeding your stomachs at the expense of your minds, aye, and at the expense of your souls, for men and women who thus live continuously, generally become selfish, indifferent to the sufferings of others, “proud stomached”—which means much more than it seems to mean—and incapable of the finer feelings.

Nor is this all that the Indian may teach us as to diet. While at times he eats everything he can lay his hands upon and also eats ravenously, in his normal condition he eats slowly and masticates thoroughly. Since Horace Fletcher wrote his most interesting and useful books on diet and life, the term “fletcherizing” has become almost universal amongst thoughtful people to express mastication to the point of liquifaction. But I was familiar with “fletcherizing” before I had ever heard of Mr. Fletcher. The Indians, with their parched corn, had taught me years before the benefit of thorough and complete mastication. I had gone off with a band of Indians on a hard week’s ride with no other food than parched corn and a few raisins. This was chewed and chewed and chewed by the hour, a handful of the grain making an excellent meal, and thoroughly nourishing the perfect bodies of these stalwart athletes, who never knew an ache or a pain, and who could withstand fatigue and hardship without a thought.

A marked and wonderful effect of thorough mastication is that it decreases the appetite from 10 to 15 per cent, and reduces the desire for flesh meat from 30 to 50 per cent. The more we masticate the less we desire to eat, and the more normal our appetites become. This in itself is a thing to be desired, for it is far easier not to have an abnormal appetite than it is to control it when it has fastened itself upon us.

Then, too, while Indians will often eat to repletion, and at their feasts indulge in disgusting gorging, they do know how to fast with calmness and equanimity. I am not prepared to say that they will fast voluntarily—except in the cases of those neophytes who are seeking some unusual powers or gifts from Those Above—yet I do know that several times I have been with them when fasting was obligatory because of the scarcity of food, and they accepted the condition without a murmur. I know a very prominent physician in San Francisco, who has an extensive practice, who pumps the food out of the stomachs of several of his gluttonous patients after their hearty French dinners. He defends his course of procedure by saying that his patients would not listen to him if he counseled fasting for even one meal, yet they are willing to allow him to remove the food after it is eaten, and to swallow some harmless “dope” that he gives them, because that is easy and requires no self-control.

I know the power of appetite; I know how hard it is to eat only that which the reason tells us is best. I know how hard it is to eat slowly and thoroughly masticate the food, but I also know that these things are imperative if one would have perfect health. Therefore, in spite of my many lapses into the old habits, I persist in asserting the good over the evil, and in teaching the good to others, in the hope that, in my own case, the good course will become the easiest to follow, and in the case of the young who listen to me they may learn the best way before they have fallen into the evil way.

There is one other thing the white race might learn from the Indian, and that is that the habitual use of flesh is not essential to health. When Captain Cook visited the Maoris of New Zealand, he found them a perfectly healthy people, and he states that he never observed a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint. Nor, among the number that were seen naked, was once perceived the slightest eruption of the skin, nor the least mark which indicated that such eruptions had formerly existed. As Dr. Kress says:

“Another proof of the health of these people was the readiness with which wounds they at any time received healed up. In a man who had been shot with a musket-ball through the fleshy part of the arm, ‘his wound seemed well digested, and in so fair a way to be healed,’ says the Captain, ‘that if I had not known that no application had been made to it, I should have inquired with very interesting curiosity after the vulnerary herbs and surgical art of the country.’

“‘An additional evidence of the healthiness of the New Zealanders,’ he says, ‘is in the great number of old men found among them. Many of them appeared to be very ancient, and yet none of them were decrepit. Although they were not equal to the young in muscular strength, they did not come in the least behind them in regard to cheerfulness and vivacity.’”

At the advent of Captain Cook, the Maoris were practically vegetarians; they had no domestic or wild animals on the islands, hence could not have been flesh eaters.

While our Indians of the Southwest will eat some forms of flesh at times, they are, generally speaking, vegetarians. The Navahos scarcely ever eat meat while in their primitive condition, and they are proud, independent, high-spirited, vigorous, healthy, and strong. So with the Havasupais and Wallapais, and most of the aborigines of this region. The Apaches also are largely vegetarians, and yet are known as a fierce and warlike people. They are fierce when aroused, but when friendly are kindly disposed, honest, reliable and good workers, strong, athletic, vigorous, and healthy. These facts demonstrate that flesh meat is not necessary. Meat is another fetich of the civilization of the white race, before which we bow down in ignorant worship. The world would be far better off, in my judgment, and as the result of my observation and experience, if we ate no flesh at all. Personally I am never so well physically and my brain so active as when I live the vegetarian life, though when I am at the tables of meat eaters I eat whatever comes and make the best of it.

The experiences of thousands of healthy and vigorous white men demonstrate that meat is not necessary to the highest development. Weston, the great pedestrian, is both a teetotaler and vegetarian; Bernarr Macfadden and several of his muscular helpers are practical vegetarians; and athletes, business men, lawyers, judges, doctors, clergymen, and many others testify to the beneficial effects of the vegetarian diet. There is no man in the civilized world to-day that works as hard and as continuously, physically as well as mentally, as Dr. J. H. Kellogg of the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He is a rigid vegetarian, and seldom eats more than one meal a day. Yet he works from 16 to 20 hours daily, edits two magazines, writes continually for scientific magazines and periodicals, attends to a vast correspondence, is the business head of the greatest sanitarium in the world, consults annually with thousands of patients, and keeps daily watch of their condition, gives numberless lectures, is always experimenting on foods and surgical appliances and inventing new instruments and methods for curing disease, and at the same time performs more surgical operations, perhaps, with less fatal results, than any other surgeon in the country. Besides this he is the president of the medical college, and lecturer to the students, and gives many lectures to the Medical Missionary Classes, and withal, finds time and strength to confer with, direct the education of, and give personal love to the ten or fifteen children he has adopted into his home and made his own.

Here is an additional item which adds strength to what I have written:

“The attention of medical men has recently been called to the case of Gustav Nordin, a hardy Swede who paddled his own canoe from Stockholm to Paris, reaching there in robust health after the long voyage, during which he lived on apples, milk, water, and bread.

“The New York Herald states that this dangerous and arduous voyage was undertaken by the Swede to show what could be done by a man who has given up meat, tea, coffee, wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco. He prides himself in eclipsing those ‘vegetarians’ who continue the use of tea and condiments.

“When in America, at the age of eighteen, Nordin was suffering so from dyspepsia that he could not take ordinary food. He therefore began a diet of fruit, principally apples, whereby he attained to his present robust condition of health.”

So, meat-eating, alcoholic-liquor-drinking white race, cast aside your high-headedness and pride, your dietetic errors and ill-health, at one and the same time, and go and learn of the Indian simplicity of diet, wise limitation of your dietary, careful and thorough mastication, and abstention from all flesh foods.

CHAPTER XI
THE INDIAN AND EDUCATION

Take it all in all, I think I believe more in the Indian’s system of education than our own,—I mean, in the principles involved. Our education is largely an education of books. We teach from books, we study from books, we get our ideas from books. Joaquin Miller’s reply to Elbert Hubbard, before quoted, seems to many people to be a foolish remark. But I see a profound thought in it. It was the poet’s protest against the too great use of books. He regards books as subversive of individual thought. He contends that books retard and prevent thought, and that we read, not to stimulate thought, but to deaden it. And undoubtedly too much reading and dependence upon books does deaden and destroy not only thought, but, alas! far worse still, the power to indulge in individual thought. Hence books are often a hindrance and a curse instead of a help and a blessing.

The Indian has no books. While he has tradition and legend, myth and story, he has no written word. Everything that is, as differentiated from everything that is supposed, in his life has to be personally learned by individual contact with the things themselves. Botany is the study of flowers, not of words about flowers. There is but one way we can really study botany, and that is out in the fields with the flower growing before us. It must be seen day in and day out from its planting until its fruition. All its development must be known and understood. The properties of its fruit, its roots, its stem, its leaves, for food, medicinal, manufacturing, or other purposes are all connected with the study. It is well to know the names of the plants, the names of all parts of plants, and the families and species to which they belong, but these latter things, important and interesting though they be, are but secondary or tertiary as compared with the primary out-door personal and intimate knowledge I have referred to.

Those who think the Indian uneducated should read Charles Eastman’s (Ohiyesa) book telling of his boyhood days with his Sioux parents and grandparents. Eastman is a full-blooded Sioux, and though later educated at Dartmouth College, still shows by his writings and words how much he reveres his wise teachers of the open air and the woods.

The fact is, that in matters pertaining to personal observation the Indian children are far ahead of our own brightest and smartest children; they observe the slightest deviations from the regular order. Who does not know of the Indian’s power in trailing. I know Navahos, Mohaves, Hopis, Havasupais, and others who will follow the dimmest trail with unerring certainty, and tell you the details of the actions of the person or animal trailed. This is education of a wonderfully useful kind; a kind that it would be well to give more of to our own children. Indeed, I have been saying, both privately and publicly, for many years, and I here repeat it, that if my children were trained to observe and reflect upon what they observed I should not care if they never went to school until they were grown up to young manhood and womanhood.

That keen, though unusual thinker, Ernest Crosby, in one of his books, presented the following, which perfectly meets my ideas and suggests what I mean in regard to the Indian:

EDUCATION

Here are two educated men.

The one has a smattering of Latin and Greek;

The other knows the speech and habits of horses and cattle, and gives them their food in due season.

The one is acquainted with the roots of nouns and verbs;

The other can tell you how to plant and dig potatoes and carrots and turnips.

The one drums by the hour on the piano, making it a terror to the neighborhood;

The other is an expert at the reaper and binder, which fills the world with good cheer.

The one knows or has forgotten the higher trigonometry and the differential calculus;

The other can calculate the bushels of rye standing in his field and the number of barrels to buy for the apples on the trees in his orchard.

The one understands the chemical affinities of various poisonous acids and alkalies;

The other can make a savory soup or a delectable pudding.

The one sketches a landscape indifferently;

The other can shingle his roof and build a shed for himself in a workman-like manner.

The one has heard of Plato and Aristotle and Kant and Comte, but knows precious little about them;

The other has never been troubled by such knowledge, but he will learn the first and last word of philosophy, “to love,” far quicker, I warrant you, than his college-bred neighbor.

For still it is true that God hath hidden these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes.

Such are the two educations:

Which is the higher, and which the lower?2

I would not have it thought that I am opposed to all systematic and book education, even on our present plan or under our present system. My protest is not so wide and sweeping as that. The main propositions upon which I base my opposition are:

1. That we do not pay sufficient attention to the physical health of our students, making health of secondary, tertiary, or quaternary importance, or often not giving it a single thought; leaving it absolutely to regulate itself, when it should be the first, primary, determinate aim and object of all education.

This very day upon which I write I sat at a professor’s table. He is a prominent educator in one of the important cities of the West. We were eating breakfast. He was complaining of indigestion. As he ate I could see his tongue seamed and coated, and his lips were rough and fevered as with stomach trouble. He helped himself to mush,—four times as much as a healthy man ought to have taken, and in far less time than it has taken me to write this he had “shoveled” it all in and “gobbled” it down. (The words in quotation marks are used thoughtfully, and they more truthfully describe what was the absolute fact than any other words with which I am familiar.)

He drank two glasses of milk warm from the cow, and ate French bread which had been heated in the oven and then saturated with butter. The night before he had opened a can of sardines,—as he said, “to see what he could eat,” and after the mush he ate a few of them. Then the maid brought in bacon and fried eggs and coffee, and he “did justice” to them. Yet he wondered why he was troubled with indigestion, and his poor wife sent word down from her bedroom that she regretted she could not see me again as she was suffering severely with one of her “regular” sick headaches. My own breakfast consisted of a small quota of mush, some of the hot bread (there was no other), and some cold milk. I felt well and happy after my frugal meal, while he confessed not only to feeling heavy and “logy,” but unsatisfied with what he had eaten—a clear proof of an abnormal appetite and a disordered digestive system.

Now, is it to be expected that with our teachers themselves so ignorant of the first principles of healthy dietetics our students should know any better? Our whole system of eating is wrong. We eat anything and everything our tastes—often perverted and depraved—demand, and we never ask ourselves the question as to whether the food is good, or our methods of eating it wise and proper. In my chapter on the Indian and diet I discuss this question more thoroughly, but I refer to it in this connection as one of the great defects of our educational system.

2. My second proposition is, that we keep our students indoors all the time,—as a settled, established custom,—with occasional short periods out of doors, instead of reversing the matter and keeping them out of doors all the time, with occasional short periods indoors.

Why keep children or university students indoors? While in the winter climate of the East outdoor life is not as possible as it is in the balmy West, there certainly can be much more time spent out of doors than there now is. We pride ourselves upon our scholastic progressiveness, yet they do these things far better in Germany. The educational and medical authorities of Berlin have organized a forest school for the city children of the crowded districts of Berlin and Charlottenburg. In a wide clearing 150 children follow—out of doors—the usual procedure of school, delightfully varied with nature study at first hand. The hours of work are short, and fresh air and exercise are given a supreme importance. The children cook their own dinners at a camp-fire, and their desks and seats and shelter-sheds were made from the timber felled to form the clearing. At 1 o’clock they are all required to take an hour’s nap, for which each child is provided with a blanket and a reclining-chair.

This is a move in the right direction. Our schools cost the nation millions of dollars each year. Surely we have a right to demand that they give us health for our children in exchange, instead of ruining it in so many cases as they now do.

In Japan out-of-door schools are quite common, especially when the cherry and plum trees are in blossom.

In Los Angeles, California, a business college holds many of its class sessions out of doors, and I trust the time will come when this will be the rule in all schools, instead of the exception.

I am perfectly well aware that there is danger that these statements will be taken too literally. They must be taken as broad and general statements. My conception is that in our present condition we live indoors and go out of doors occasionally. I would have that proposition reversed. We should live out of doors and go indoors occasionally.

The same common sense and rational mode of reading my words must be applied to all that I say on out-of-door education. Naturally, I am not such a fool as to suppose that all educational or scientific or any other work can be done out of doors. Though I am not a college professor, and never shall be, though I am not a scientific expert, and never can be, though I am not many things that other men are, I know enough—have observed and seen enough—to know that delicate experiments of a variety of kinds need the most rigid indoor seclusion for their successful conducting. But this does not alter my general propositions, viz., that the health of students is of more importance than any and all education given in schools or colleges; that outdoor life is more conducive to the health of students than indoor life, and that, therefore, where possible, all education should be given out of doors.

3. As a result of this indoor scholastic life, we content ourselves by teaching our children from books,—which at best are but embalmed knowledge, canned information, the dry bones of knowledge, words about things,—instead of bringing them in contact (as far as is possible and practicable) with the things themselves. I believe in books; I believe in education; I believe in schools, in colleges, in universities, in teachers, professors, and doctors of learning; but I do not believe in them as most of the white race seem to do, viz., as good in themselves. They are good only as they are instruments for good to the children committed to their care. The proper education of one child is worth more to the world than all the schools, colleges, and universities that were ever built. One Michael Angelo, one Savonarola, one Francis of Assisi, one Luther, one Agassiz, one Audubon, is worth more to the world than all the schools that ever were or ever will be. And if, by our present imperfect and unhealthful school methods, we kill off, in childhood, one such great soul, we do the human race irreparable injury. Let us relegate the school to its right place, and that is secondary to its primary,—the child. The school exists for the child, not the child for the school. As it now is, we put the plastic material of which our nation is to be formed into the mould of our schools, and regardless of consequences, indifferent to the personal equation in each child, overlooking all individuality and personality, the machine works on, stamping this soul and mind material with one same stamp, moulding it in one same mould, hardening it in the fire to one same pattern, so that it comes forth just as bricks come forth from a furnace, uniform, regular, alike, perhaps pretty to the unseeing eye, but ruined, spoiled, damned, as far as active, personal, individualistic life and work are concerned. The only human bricks that ever amount to anything when our educational mill has turned them out are those made of refractory clay,—the incomplete ones, the broken ones, the twisted ones, those that would not or could not be moulded into the established pattern.

This is why I am so opposed to our present methods. Let us have fewer lessons from books, and more knowledge gained by personal observation; less reading and cramming, and more reflective thinking; fewer pages of books read, and more results and deductions gained from personal experiences with things high and low, animate and inanimate, that catch the eye and mind out of doors; and above all the total cessation of all mental labor when the body is not at its best. The crowding of sick and ailing children is more cruel and brutal than Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and so utterly needless and useless that fools couldn’t do worse. What is the use of education to a sick person, and especially when the sickness is the result of the educational process. God save us from any more such education!

Doubtless I shall be told that my ideas are impracticable. I know they are and ever will be to those who value “the system” more than the child. Granted that in cold and wet weather students can’t get out of doors much. Then open all the doors and all the windows and give up the time to marching, to physical exercises, to deep breathing, to anything,—romping even,—rather than to cramming and studying a set number of pages, while the air breathed is impure, unwholesome, actively poisonous. When our educational methods thus interfere with the health of the child, I am forever and unalterably opposed to them. We had far rather have a nation of healthy and happy children, growing up into healthy and happy manhood and womanhood, even though devoid of much book knowledge, than a bloodless, anæmic, unhappy nation though filled with all the lore of the ages. Give me, for me and mine, every time, physical and mental health and happiness, even though we have never parsed a single sentence, determined the family and Latin name of a single flower, or found out the solution of one solitary problem of algebra.

4. My fourth proposition is, that as the result of this indoor book-teaching our children are not taught to think for themselves, but are expected and required to accept the ideas of the authors,—often, indeed, they must memorize the exact words of the books. This is, in itself, enough to condemn the whole system. We could better afford to have absolutely no schools, no colleges, no books even, than a nation professedly educated, yet the members of which have not learned to do their own thinking.

5. As a conclusion, therefore, I am forced to recognize that, in a much larger measure than we are ready to admit, our educational system is superficial, is a cramming process instead of a drawing-out—educere, educational—process, and no education so-called can be really effective, really helpful, that thus inverts the natural requirements of the mind. And that, when our system ignores the physical health of the student, no matter what his age, it is a criminal, a wicked, a wasteful system that had better speedily be reformed or abolished.

All these ideas are practically the result of my association with the Indian and watching his methods of instruction. His life and that of his family out of doors color all that he and they learn. I think it was John Brisbane Walker who once wrote a story, when he edited and owned the Cosmopolitan, about some college men, thoroughly educated in the academic sense, who were shipwrecked at sea. He showed the helplessness and hopelessness of their case because of their inability to take hold and do things. The Indian can turn his hand to anything. When out of doors few things can feaze him. He knows how to build a fire in the rain, where to sleep in a storm, how to track a runaway animal, how to trap fish, flesh, or fowl, where to look for seeds, nuts, berries, or roots, how to hobble a horse when he has no rope,—that is, how to make a rope from cactus thongs, how to picket a horse where there is no tree, bush, fence, bowlder, nor anything to which to tie it. What college man knows how to picket a horse to a hole in the ground? Yet I have seen an Indian do it, and have done it myself several times.3 He knows how to find water when there is none in sight and the educated white man is perishing for want of it, and he knows a thousand and one things that a white man never knows.