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.