In 1863 seven of the pueblo governors went to Washington to see the Great Father and to settle with him the question as to the boundaries of their land grants, and very probably other Indian problems. After their conference, Lincoln presented each governor with a silver-headed cane, upon which was engraved as below, varying only as to the name of the pueblo:

A. Lincoln
Prst. U.S.A.
Ácoma
1863.

The cane is passed to each succeeding governor upon his election in January, and constitutes his badge of office. When he is absent it is given to the man who represents him. On our second visit to Ácoma in 1922 we saw it hanging on the wall of our host’s living-room, since the governor was temporarily away from the pueblo. In a sense, therefore, the government of the United States is represented in the election ceremony each year at seven of the New Mexico pueblos, of which I have learned the names of only four, besides Ácoma—Isleta, Tesuque, Taos, and Zuñi.

In an attempt to learn wherein the laws and courts of the United States government coincide or conflict with such a local pueblo organization as has been outlined in Chapter XI, I have read the annual reports of the Commissioner for Indian affairs from 1854 to 1920, but with no very satisfactory result. Up to 1875, apparently, the only resource the Indian agents had, when crimes and disorders occurred, was military force. In 1915, murder, assault with intention to kill, arson, and burglary were under the jurisdiction of American courts, but the commissioner stated that our citizens were not thus safeguarded against many other misdemeanors, some of a serious nature. This dual control results in a divided allegiance in government as in religion among the pueblo peoples and must induce infinite difficulties on the one hand and deceptions that are truly deplorable on the other. Throughout these Reports, however, it is interesting and gratifying to find that praise of the Pueblo Indians is almost universal. They are described by commissioner after commissioner as being as “different from the Indians of the Plains as light from darkness,” or “as men of a wholly different race.” The adjectives “loyal,” “generous,” “honest,” “industrious,” “amiable,” “eminently self-supporting,” are constantly used to describe the village peoples.

In 1867 the commissioner regrets that since the “marauding Indians” have to be placated so often, “these very friendly and deserving people” have become “ill at ease” and distrustful of our government agents because our promises to them are not kept. In 1874, the commissioner protests that the failure to produce order among the Indians is “largely attributable to the fundamental failure to treat the Indian as a man capable of civilization and therefore a proper subject of the Government and amenable to its laws. At the same time tribal government has virtually broken down by contact with the United States” and he specifically recommends “qualified citizenship.” In 1915 Cato Sells, the commissioner, writes: “The Indian has demonstrated his capacity for intellectual and moral progress amid conditions not always propitious,” and in 1917 he declares that the time has come “for discontinuing guardianship of all competent Indians and giving closer attention to the incompetent so as to fit them to transact their own affairs and control their property.” Such a procedure would leave the Indian assured of full personal rights, quite free to work out his own destiny, while relieving the government of a large number of wards and placing at the same time, before those Indians left under guardianship, an incentive for progress and true ideals of citizenship.

The World War did much toward impressing the Indian with the truth that his welfare can only be advanced through opportunity to share the benefits accruing to our free and self-governing nation. “The Indians signally honored themselves” by the part they took in war activities, but the commissioner dissented from the proposition to make of them separate units in the army. “I want the Indian to go into this conflict as the equal and comrade of every man who assails autocracy and ancient might, and to come home with a new light in his face and a clean conception of the democracy in which he may prosper and participate.” In 1920 he adds that the recent attitude of our government has been “sympathetic, humane and definitely practical,” and recognizes the Indian as “the first and hyphenless American, with quick intellect, glowing spirituality, ardent love for his children, and faithful to his promises”—until betrayed. In his tribal state, all his training was individualistic; the good of the whole was not definitely sought for. “In our policy of absorbing the Indian into the body politic,” we must educate him to care for the welfare of society, but we “must take into account his peculiar endowment which is his social heritage,—religion, art, deftness of hand and sensitive esthetic temperament.” A most interesting piece of information in the Report is that “Indian soldiers and sailors honorably discharged from service in the World War may be granted citizenship by Federal courts without affecting their individual or tribal property rights.”

But, immediately the question arises, have the educational privileges offered the Indians since the United States took them over as its wards been such as would fit them for citizenship? Everyone knows that under Spanish rule the mission schools directed by the padres did excellent civilizing work and that under Mexican independence these schools were less well supported. The United States assumed control in 1846, twenty-two years later. In 1868 the commissioner reports that “there is not a single school nor mechanical shop” in existence, that parish priests who formerly resided in the pueblos have “long since given up any such ideas,” and that there are no government farmers: in short, that the Indians “have been steadily retrograding” since they became the wards of the United States—a melancholy statement indeed! In 1872 the report states that the Indians have been granted 439,664 acres of land, and that there are five schools conducted to teach the children the English language. In 1920, three fourths of all Indian children are said to be in school where their studies are “pre-vocational and vocational with an elimination of needless studies.” “The increased attendance of Indian children in state and in public schools will eventually take them out of Government Indian day and boarding schools.”

In following up this matter more specifically as pertaining to Ácoma, we find the Indian agent reporting in 1897 that there were fifty-five children on the mesa, but no school. The building formerly used by Catholic missionaries for a school-house was used by the United States in some other way. In 1917 the agent again reports “no school at Ácoma but one at Acomita. If the mesa is still to be inhabited” he recommends that a school should be installed there, but admits that “because the people are most unprogressive, the situation demands the utmost tact and ability.” In 1919, the agent says that “of 150 children of school age but 19 were in attendance at Acomita and that the Ácoma people are very backward, almost resentful of anything being done to assist them. So long as there is opportunity for them to remain in isolation at the peñol of Ácoma, where almost anyone can be safely hidden in the cliffs and escape from the influence of law and authority, there is an opportunity for them to evade their duties and responsibilities. Much as Ácoma appeals to me, as it must to anyone having the least regard for history and sentiment, I believe that to minimize its importance is an important step in the progress of these people.” This agent’s remedy would be to increase permanent school facilities at Acomita and exert “proper pressure” to make the children attend.[102]

I was told in 1922 that all children not at Acomita are sent to Albuquerque or Santa Fé, but it was fairly obvious that a good many of the younger ones can get no regular teaching whatever, since their parents migrate too frequently between the mesa and the farm villages.

The long procession of the years has produced but little material change in Ácoma. Very few references to this pueblo occur in government reports and such alteration as one notes is in the increased hostility of the mental attitude of its people toward the white man. Its geographic isolation from other pueblos is matched by its aloofness in every other respect. No matter at what point of mental or spiritual contact we attempt some rapprochement, we are now met by closed doors and our knocking gains no entrance. Yet it was not always so at Ácoma.

Lieutenant Abert, who was, in 1847, a member of the Advanced Guard of the Army of the West, says, in his “Examination of New Mexico,” that when he had gone to Ácoma from Laguna,

On their way to the rock his party overtook or passed many Indians going thither with burros heavy-laden with peaches, and on the summit the men urged the Americans to eat all they wished of this delicious fruit. It was carried to their azoteas, or roofs, where, cut in halves, it was spread to be dried in the sun. Compare such cordial friendliness and the spirit shown in the Indian agent’s report in 1919, and ask yourself, why this change?

How ardently one wishes the Ácomas might believe in our sincere sympathy and would respond as the Zuñis and Hopis have done, who say they wish us to know about their beliefs and their rich legacy of tribal lore, if only we will record it “straight and true”; or, as the High Chief among the Cheyennes and the Dakotas is quoted in that delightful book by Natalie Curtis Burlin:[103]

Or, as Short Bull, a Dakota medicine man, phrased it (when the Federal government forbade the Ghost Dance movement and, in order to enforce this mandate, massacred three hundred men and women of that tribe),

I should like to incorporate here entire the splendid appeal of Commissioner Francis E. Leupp, for the development of the Indian along the lines of his own genius. His protest against the idea of the white philanthropist, that the Navajos should be supplied with power-looms to advance their particular industry of blanket-weaving, contains more irony than is often found in official reports. Mr. Leupp sums up the situation in the following words:

After one has learned from very varied sources how tragic is the gulf of misunderstanding that has yawned between the races, one asks perforce, was it necessary, and if not, why did it happen? Even in the days of their early and difficult adjustment to the new rulers who came and took their lands, their corn, their freedom, there was much of kindliness and receptivity among the Pueblo Indians which the centuries of white over-lordship has turned to bitterness and hostility. One cause of their distrust has been, besides our bad faith in smaller matters, the encroachment of our race upon the lands assured them by the Spaniards, grants long ago confirmed by the United States. But the more vital hurt has come from the total misapprehension by white men of the significance of their “dances” and their withdrawals to the wilderness for fasting and prayer. The contempt shown for their rich heritage of poetic ceremony has wounded the Indian in his deepest and holiest susceptibilities, especially when this criticism is accompanied by a Federal ban upon their periodic festivals, upon their native costume, and limitations upon their freedom in pursuing their crafts and their whole manner of life. One is forced to conclude that we have not yet, as the governing race, really understood the task or the responsibility that we assumed in taking over as wards human beings with an individuality highly sensitive and highly developed. If the two paths so long travelled at cross purposes by the two races shall ever converge and become but one, we may be sure the gain will not all be to the Indian. His poetry, his art, his music, his religion, are all fraught with infinite suggestions from which the white man may well learn to his profit.

Yet in spite of so much expert testimony through the years, the United States Senate in the autumn of 1922 passed a bill that is the most injurious to the Indian of all that the Federal government has ever been besought to make the law of the land. Unless there can be substituted for the Bursum Bill[105] something permanently protecting and effective, it would be more humane to make brief work of the complete annihilation of the Indian race by standing up the tribes, one after another, to face a firing squad of the army.

The writer has been told by well-informed men in the East that, unless some thorough and honest remedy for the present situation is carried out, an explosion is bound to come. That the Indians themselves will choose to die fighting, after the tradition of their race, rather than by slow starvation, is hardly to be wondered at or condemned.[106] The Paiute uprising in 1923 is only the first torch of what we may expect to hear of here, there, anywhere, like the signal fires of the ancients, till all the Indian country is aflame.

And when the beacons are all put out, and there remain only silence and ashes, we, the ruling race, proud of our superior intelligence, will have deliberately and completely killed the only original contribution by America to the art of the world.

This chapter may be fitly closed with