The American Indian 1
(February 1, 1927):2-3, 15.
By
Ruth Margaret Muskrat
"This is first day of the New
Year. And there is no better time for us
who are of the Indian race to pause and take stock of ourselves. There is no better time than this to ask
ourselves what we are going to do with the great racial heritage that has been
handed down to us by our forefathers.
I know that you have been told you
are the hope of the Indian race so often that you are tired of hearing the
phrase. And the statement that our
generation is responsible for the future of the Indian
race has been repeated so many times that it has become a truism.
But these two statements are the
very thing I'm going to ask you to consider this morning. We cannot hear them too often or consider
them too seriously. For
they are true. We are the hope of
the Indian race! And on the shoulders of
this generation of Indian youth does rest the responsibility and the glory of
our race. I know of no better way to put
it than use just those words that you have heard so often, and come, it seems
to me, to think about so little. The
realization of this great responsibility ought to overshadow every action we
take with the fire of its challenge. And
yet, I wonder if it does?
I do not need to recall to you the
history of our race. Every Indian youth
knows, or ought
To
know the heritage of greatness and nobility that has been handed down to us by
our Indian forebears. You know the story
of King Philip, that great warrior with his superb pride and his dauntless
courage. Hemmed in on every side by a
people and a civilization he could not understand, betrayed by the friends he
loved, forsaken even by the very ones he sought to defend, his home destroyed,
his family wiped out, nothing but death facing him, still he fought bravely on
to the end without one thought of giving up the fight. He was not fighting for himself, for what had
life left for him now, but he fought for the people who were his own and whom
he loved. What a heritage of devotion
there is for us in his life alone! What
a heritage of courage and fearlessness.
There are hundreds of such
examples. Noble
leaders who saw the crises of their time and arose nobly to meet them. Another kind of hero, but no less a great
one, is Sequoyah who dared to accomplish the task he set for himself in spite
of the jeers of the very people who should have been the first to encourage
him. Sometimes in these days you and I
are afraid to stand out for an issue in which we really believe, down in our
secret hearts, because we are not strong enough to face the criticism of our
associates. Listen to this story of
Sequoyah.
He was a comparatively young man
when he first conceived his dream of a Cherokee alphabet. He had been a very skillful warrior and a
very popular youth among his tribesmen.
But when he left off these lesser things to follow the path of his great
dream he lost his popularity. Oftentimes
that is the price a dreamer has to pay if he would make his dreams come
true.
Sequoyah's friends jeered at him and
called him a fool. Even his wife
declared him to be crazy or possessed by a devil. Then one day, at the end of those ten years,
his wife in a rage of impatience with this husband whom she could not
understand, burned all his manuscripts and his records, the fruits of ten hard
years of patient labor. In the face of
even this devastating calamity, Sequoyah did not give up.
He started all over again, and this
time with such earnestness that at the end of three years he had his alphabet
completed much more perfectly than it had ever been before. It is said that no alphabet in all the
history of mankind is more perfect than this invented by one Indian man, and
that any Cherokee who speaks this language may learn to read and write it in
four or five hours of hard study.
Sequoyah's struggles were not ended
with the completion of his alphabet. The
first thing he did was to teach his little daughter to read: and then the whole
tribe began to cry out that he had bewitched his own child and that both of
them must be burned at the stake. There
was a long trial by the members of the council, and at last it was decided to
call in [some] of the younger warriors from a neighboring town to sit in judgment
on this man who had just offered such a priceless gift to his people. "For," said the old chief, "it
may be that he is inspired by the Great Spirit and not by the evil ones."
The young men sat in judgment. They proposed a test, that
Sequoyah should teach his jurors to read and write his alphabet. He had only a few hours allowed him for this
great task but he succeeded, and in this way the Cherokee alphabet was given to
the world. What a heritage of perseverance
his life is for all us Indians who belong to this generation! What a vision for us to follow! What an example of patience and courage.
I do not think it was an accident
that our past history is so replete with the lives of great men. Deep within the heart of our race must have
been implanted a spiritual vision and a nobility of soul that produced great
leaders! I believe that same nobility of
soul, that same spiritual vision still lives in the heart of the Indian race
today! But I am afraid that too often we
allow it to lie dormant, buried deep beneath a load of
trivial and unimportant things. You and
I have a great heritage. But even a
great heritage can be cast aside and trampled in the dust.
Ours is the challenge and the responsibility
to see that this does not happen to our race.
Ours is the privilege of carrying forward the great past of our
forebears. How are we going to discharge
that responsibility?
I have believed for a long while
that the Indian race is now at the greatest crisis in all its history! I believe we must literally live or die on
the merits of the present generation. [If]
we can prove our fitness to live, we shall survive as a race. If we can not, then we shall be condemned to
a slow death and nothing except a tradition of our past shall be left to the
world. You know that the old life has
gone. And you know that already, whether
we wish it or not, a new life has come to take its place. And you and I must either go forward on that
new life or we must go backward. We can
not stand still. We have a greater task
ahead of us than any warrior kinsman of ours who ever lived! Ours is a greater challenge than any war cry
ever sounded before in all the history of our race! For we must lead our people
back into their ancient heritage of greatness. We must blaze new trails for a newer and
greater glory. We must find the way for
our race to come back once more into economic independence; back out of the
stagnation of idleness and decay into which these centuries of dependence have
plunged us. All of this is before us to
do in spite of new and changing conditions.
It is no easy task! Compared to this--the ancient warpath was an
easy trail to follow! It is an easy
thing, under the impulse of excitement and encouragement of war, to go out and
die on the field of battle to save your people by this one act of bravery,
compared to the strenuous job of living day after day to the level of the
highest that is in you! And that is the
kind of living you and I are called to do.
Because we are a small group in the midst of an alien civilization, the focus of all eyes are centered upon us. Every success we make, every failure we make,
is conspicuous. Because we are such a
small group, no Indian boy or girl has a right to be a failure, for by failing
we not only pull ourselves down, but we pull down our whole race. Everywhere people are looking to us, watching
to see how we are discharging these responsibilities of ours.
As I have traveled over the country,
time and time again I have been asked these questions: "Does it pay to
educate an Indian?" "Does the
Indian boy or girl take advantage of opportunities offered them?" "Do the Indian people have any sense of
responsibility toward their own race?"
Those are fair questions! We are
still a race of people with a reputation to make. People have a right to ask those questions of
us. And how they are to be answered
depends entirely upon you and me.
If our task is harder than our
forefathers faced, we have also greater advantages for facing it. Our ancestors had only the traditions of
their own tribe to help them look into the future. You and I not only have the past of the whole
Indian race at our command, but we have all the civilizations of the world to
teach us. Greece and Rome, Egypt and
ancient Assyria, Babylona and Palestine, all the past experiences of the whole
human race is ours to glean wisdom from if we but care to look into it. We have the golden key to unlock the treasure
house of all the world.
Any Indian boy or girl who wants it
bad enough may have all the rich treasures of an education. Ought not our future history
be far greater than any past record of the race? Would you not much prefer to live in this age
and this generation with its rare privileges and its responsibilities? Your race needs the best that is in you. And it needs more you more than it has ever
needed you in the past or may ever need you again.
"Who knows but that thou art
come into the kingdom for such a time as this?"
I do not know of any way we can face
up to our responsibility as members of the Indian race, except as each
individual of us resolves in our hearts to give to the world the highest and
the best that we have. After all, it is
an individual matter. We can not all get
together and vote to make the Indian race great and noble by popular vote. It has to be done by the quiet and earnest
living of every individual member of that race.
And I wish that the resolution each and every one of us could make at
this New Year would be to let no action of ours dim in any way the bright
heritage of our past. A great race must
be made up of great individuals. And if
we would be a great race we must put our minds to the difficult task of living
greatly.
There are many things along this
life which I believe we Indians need especially to think about. One of the things we need most to learn is to
put first things first. Once in the city
of
Dean Briggs tells a story of a group
of young people whom he saw at
Reading bad literature when we might
be reading something worth while is one of the commonest ways in which we fail
to put first things first. Reading good
literature is like letting a flood of light and beauty covered over with
whitewash and dirt and rubbish. With
painstaking care the artist removed all the whitewash and dirt from the picture
and thus the famous Bargello portrait of Dante was restored to the world. Says Mr. Fosdick: "The Bargello portrait was not
destroyed, but somebody cared more for dirt and whitewash than they did for the
beauty of the painting." In our
busy life here at Haskell we have time only for a certain number of
things. Something has to be left out,
necessitating that somewhere we are going to have to make a choice. If we expend our energies on an unimportant
thing here, a trivial matter there, we are going to find that we shall have, in
the end, only a bare and shallow existence, missing completely the richness and
the abundance of life that should have been our heritage.
Another thing we as Indians, and
indeed as members of the human race, need to learn is to face the truth about
ourselves, and to face it unflinchingly.
I noticed so often on the part of my students and others I have come in
contact with, tendency to rationalize, to make excuses, not only to other
people but even to themselves, instead of standing up and squarely facing the
truth. I wonder how many of you here,
when you have been reprimanded by your matron or your teacher or someone else
in authority, have said, "She is showing partiality. She is picking on me. I am no worst than the rest of the
girls." It does not matter in the
least whether you are no worse that the rest of the school. Indeed, your job ought to be to live above the
average, to be just a little better than the rest of mankind. What does matter tremendously is whether you
have the moral courage to face the consequences of your own actions without
trying to slide out from under, and place the responsibility on someone beside
yourself, where it rightly belongs.
As a race, we think too much about
the past, and we dwell too long on what someone has done to us. We do not think enough about what we are
doing for ourselves and [to] ourselves.
Here at school you say, "My teacher does not make me hand in my
assignments, and so I don't do my school work." You think you are "getting by." And some of us think it is a smart and clever
thing to do. Are we going to have a prop
to lean on forever? We have been
bolstered up too much already! It is
time now that we begin to stand on our own feet. It is said that Chief Logan, at one time, in
giving council to a young warrior, said:
"My Son, do not fear the face of any living man."
Such was the spirit of our
fathers! But if we are to preserve that
noble heritage of bravery we cannot afford to be moral cowards. We must face the truth about ourselves. To keep for the world the nobility or
character that rightly belongs to the Indian race, you and I must nobly.
We
must daily cry:
"Build the more stately mansions, Oh my soul.
As the swift seasons roll
Leave they low vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last.
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast.
Till at length thou art free.
Leave thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea."
There is one thing more that we need
to think about in building up a great deal for our race. One of the gravest faults of us Indians and
this generation is that we do not have the power to stay by our task until it
is finished. We begin to build, but we
cannot hold out until the job is completed.
It is an easy thing to make a good beginning at any task, but to bring
that task to a great conclusion requires rare patience. If you do not believe we give up when the way
becomes a little hard, look at your own school here. Look at the size of the freshman class with its
great numbers, and compare it with the senior class! How many have dropped out because the work
became too difficult? It took too much
effort to finish what had been begun. In
my own junior class almost an average of one boy a month has dropped out--gone A.
W. O. L.--just because he hadn't the power to see the work through. They couldn't stick,
quitters!
I know an Indian man who started to
build a great life for himself. He went through high school with honors, and
then he graduated from college. He
distinguished himself. And newspapers
all over the
What do you think would have
happened to the world if Jesus had given up his fight in the
Map out your course and follow it
unswervingly. Finish the work you set
out to do! We are too easily
discouraged. We want to expend our
energies in too many little streams, trying first one thing, then another
thing, and so accomplish nothing. Let us
look deep into the life of Sequoyah, and of King Phillip, and of other great
leaders of ours and find there the everlasting examples of the patience and
courage that is necessary to give us the power to see a thing through.
We of this generation of Indians who
have been given a freedom, a responsibility and a power greater than any other
race has ever known.
What are we going to do with this freedom? How are we going to discharge this
responsibility? Shall we prove ourselves
worthy of such a privilege. We must determine what the future of our race
is going to be. You and I must decide
right now, today, whether we want it to live on, worthy of the great traditions
of the past. Or
whether we are willing to see it fall deeper and deeper into decay. By the lives we each determine to live, and
by our power to make such a determination into reality, we can show our
choice. There is no other convincing
answer.
There have been times in the past
history of our race when crises had to be met.
Our forefathers, perhaps, were not able to see so clearly when the
moment of choice arrived. The hour
struck and they did not know. They had
to meet the issues blindly, as they arose, for they had no way of understanding
what the future might bring.
Today you and I have no such
excuse. Today we can look into the
future and see what we do. Because we
have the knowledge of all the right and wrong choices of the past--because we
have at our command the past experiences of all the people of history, we stand
at a point where we can look forward and backward and know what is good. Your choice must be of your own making, and
it is a deliberate choice. There is no
better time for it than the first day of the new year
with its opportunities for a new beginning and a new life.
"See--I have set before thee
this day life and good, death and evil: therefore choose life that thou mayest
live--thou and thy seed."--The
Indian Leader.