Even our artists and designers may learn much of great importance from the Indian. While to most of my readers it may come as a surprise that I claim great artistic powers for the Indian, yet no one can carefully study the basketry and pottery of the Amerind and not know the perfect justice of the claim. In my larger work on this subject5 I have fairly discussed the ability of the Indians in this regard; and to those who are not aware of the vast debt the white race owes to the aboriginal woman in artistic as well as other lines, I earnestly commend a perusal of that masterly work by a conscientious and thorough student, Otis T. Mason, of the Smithsonian Institution, entitled “Woman’s Share in Primitive Culture.”

In reference to their basketry, however, more than a mere passing mention is required. The Indian weaver shows marvelous ability in the creation of form, color, stitch, and design. Turning to Nature for her original inspirations she is not a mere copyist of what others have done. All her forms are based upon utility, and therefore meet the first and highest requirement of all art when applied to articles that are to serve a useful purpose, viz., adaptation to use. There is no reversal of principles in manufacture, as is so often the case with white workers who value appearance, so-called ornament, finish, etc., rather than adaptation to purpose or utility. Wherever anything is allowed to usurp the place of this primary element, the work is doomed even before it is made. On the other hand, frankness, honesty, simplicity, directness, characterize the manufactures of the Indian. They are to serve such and such a purpose; that purpose is openly denoted. The result is that, to the unperverted eye, the artistic work of the unspoiled Indian is as perfect in form as it can be. There is no wild straining after unique effect; no fantastic distortions to secure novelty; everything is natural and rational, and therefore artistically effective.

In color, too, the original work of the Indian weavers, before the vile aniline dyes were forced upon them by the “civilized” and “Christian” traders and missionaries, was above criticism. The old baskets and blankets are eagerly sought after, at fabulous prices, by the most refined and critical of artists and connoisseurs because of the perfection of their color harmonies. In every good collection are to be seen such specimens that are both the admiration and despair of modern artists.

As for weave, it is asserted upon the highest authority that there is not a weave or stitch known to modern art that was not given to our civilization by the aborigines. And they have many stitches of great effectiveness that we have not availed ourselves of. Take the Pomas alone—a tribe of basket-makers who live in northern California. They have not less than fourteen different stitches or weaves, some of them of marvelous beauty and strength. In one of the accompanying pictures is a specimen of their carrying baskets. This basket will hold a large load of seeds or fruit, and when so laden requires a construction of great durability to sustain the burden. It is woven with this express purpose in view, yet it is artistically decorated with a beautifully worked out design. Here is an important lesson the white race might learn, viz., that the utensils of daily life should be surrounded with as much beauty as is practical. The kitchen should be as full of enjoyment to the eye, in reason, as the parlor. The cook and maid need Æsthetic surroundings as well as—indeed, more than,—the mistress and her children. If social custom insists upon making servants of one part of its members, the other part should be willing to make their “servitude” as comfortable and beautiful as is possible and practicable. Think of these poor, ignorant(!) Indian women making baskets for porridge, carrying baskets, plaques for holding food, mush bowls, and a score of other purposes, all beautifully decorated and ornamented with designs that express some emotion of their own souls, some ambition, some aspiration, or some happy memory.

In the matter of these designs the white race has much it may learn from the Indian. Sometimes I have looked upon the patterns and colors of our wallpapers, our rugs, our carpets, our chintzs, our calicoes, and especially upon the wool work or embroidery of some women, and have been compelled to ask myself if hideousness could be carried to any further extent. Some of the designs were the absolute delirium tremens of craziness,—conventionality reconventionalized again and again, until it was made unlike to anything in “the heavens above, the earth beneath, or the waters under the earth.”

I was once lecturing to a “civilized” and “cultivated” audience upon this subject of Indian designs that have a personal meaning, and when I got through I heard one highly civilized and cultivated man exclaim in disgust: “Why, he’ll soon try to make us believe that our own wall-paper patterns ought to mean something!”

Most certainly I will! The idea that we, the superior, the wise race, use designs in our goods that are supposed to be beautiful to us, and yet that have no meaning! What absurdity and foolishness for our girls and women to spend hours on “fancy-work” (!), the designs of which are a crazy, intricate something to be dreaded rather than admired. The Indians have more sense than to waste their time over such foolishness. They have studied Nature in all her varying forms, and their minds are stored up with a thousand and one designs which they can transfer at pleasure to their basketry, pottery, or blanketry. I have had the pleasure of teaching this basic principle of art work to many white women, and I learned it from the Indian. One woman wanted to get a design for her sofa pillows. I asked her if she had no flowering vine over her porch. She said “Yes.” “Then copy its leaf and flower,” was my reply, and when she did so, and saw the beauty of the design she had created from Nature, her soul was filled with a new joy, and she wrote me that few things had given her more pleasure than the discovery of that basic principle.

Think of the white race making baskets. Where do they go to for their forms and designs? In thousands of cases they take my own books and copy from them! But where did I get them? I am no creative artist, no inventor of design! I got them, “body, soul, and breeches,” from the Indian,—every one of them; and yet the “superior race” must go to them to copy, instead of so disciplining the powers of observation from Nature that designs for embroidery, for basketry, for fancy-work of every description, are contained within their own memories. The Indian’s life has trained these wonderful faculties of observation and memory. He was compelled to watch the animals in order that he might avoid those that were dangerous and catch those that were good for food; to follow the flying birds that he might know when and where to trap them and secure their eggs; the fishes as they spawned and hatched; the insects as they bored and burrowed; the plants and trees as they grew and budded, blossomed and seeded. He became familiar, not only with such simple things as the movements of the polar constellations and the retrograde and forward motions of the planets, but also with the less known spiral movements of the whirl-winds as they took up the sands of the desert; and the zigzags of the lightning were burned into his consciousness and memory in the fierce storms that, again and again, in darkest night, swept over the exposed area in which he roamed; with the flying of the birds, the graceful movements, the colors, and markings of the snakes, the peculiar wigglings of insects, and their tracks, and those of reptiles, birds, and animals, whether upon the sand, the snow, the mud, or more solid earth, he soon became familiar. The rise and fall of the mountains and valleys, the soaring spires and wide-spreading branches of the trees, the shadows they cast, and the changes they underwent as the seasons progressed, the scudding or anchored clouds in their infinitude of form and color, the graceful arch of the rainbow, the peculiar formation and dissipation of the fogs, the triumphant lancings of the night by the gorgeous fire-weapons of the morning sun, the stately retreat of the king of day as evening approached,—all these and a thousand and one other things of beauty in Nature the Indian soon learned to know, and from all these mental images he can readily draw when a design is needed.

AN EXQUISITELY WOVEN YOKUT BASKET SHOWING ORIGIN OF ST. ANDREW’S CROSS, FROM THE DIAMOND OF THE RATTLESNAKE.