Across the great Oraibi Valley was the pueblo of Chimopovi, perched on
the highest of the mesa cliffs. And this place had a suburb, dominated
by one Sackaletztewa, a direct descendant of the gentleman who had
founded the original Hopi settlement after their emerging from the
Underworld. Sackaletztewa was as orthodox as old Youkeoma, and it was
his following that had given battle to a former Agent and his Navajo
police. I proposed to Colonel Scott that Chimopovi should be visited.
“Take the troop to-morrow morning, and finish it up yourself.”
So next day the same scene was enacted. It was a short job, only three
children being found; but here occurred something like resistance. All
the protestants congregated in the house of Sackaletztewa. When I
entered, a man opened a little cupboard of the wall and produced a
packet of papers. They were offered to me as documents of great value.
And they were strange documents—letters from people of the country who
had read in newspapers of Youkeoma’s visit to Washington, and his
defiance of the Government. I suppose such persons have nothing better
to do, and write letters of sympathy to the members of every Indian
delegation that parades itself eastward in feathers and war-paint to
present a fancied grievance. I recall the words of one of these papers,
from some weak-minded woman:—
Chief Youkeoma: you are a noble man. Do not let the Government have
your children. Their schools are not the place for your Indian lads
who know only the hunt and the open spaces. Resist to the last
gasp. Die rather than submit.
Very like, she is now writing scenarios. Of course this correspondent
had read Fenimore Cooper, and was filled to the neck with the storybook
idea of Indians—lithe, clean, untouched by disease, and painted by
romance. The Southwest has no such Indians; and Indians, whether lithe
or not, are seldom clean and never romantic. She knew nothing of filth
and trachoma and child-prostitution, while the Hopi had brought such
things to a fine degree of perfection. And she lived in Indiana.
Now there is a wide difference between demanding the rights of Indians,
rights that should be sacred under agreements,—and perhaps foreign
treaties, such as those of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico,—and
inciting them to warfare and rebellion when teachers and physicians are
striving to recover them from ignorance and disease. There is a vast
difference between the argument that a title confirmed by three
sovereign Governments be not attacked for the sake of political loot—as
in the case of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico—and denouncing the
educational system of the United States and advising a group of
benighted savages to kill in a distant and lonely desert. That writer
from Indiana should have been a field matron for a little!
I have no sympathy with this type of sentimentalist. I deported some of
them from the Hopi desert country when they appeared with their box of
theoretical tricks.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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