The average bureaucrat, admiring the Allotment Acts, thinks that an Indian’s head may be jammed into a regulation lathe, and with a few twists and spins turned out a full-fledged Mid-west agriculturist—just such a man as Thompson Seton said needed community centres made for him, to keep him from becoming an inmate of an insane asylum. Just so. But it cannot be done, my masters, with the speed of the mimeograph that grinds out your tirades and exhortations. Your Allotment Acts have been good friends to South Dakotans and others who wished to speculate in lands; but they have produced untold misery among the Indian peoples, and have utterly destroyed an innocent and simple phase of American life. Now I never agreed with the ecclesiastical gentleman who thought that the Hopi mesa system was wholly one of beauty and idealism. But the writing man did force on me a realization of the utility and sanity to be found in the life that the Hopi had unconsciously adopted. Begun as a defense against enemies, the result in peace times was for good, if accompanied by sanitation and the protection of the younger generation. And I accepted a new view of the Indian ceremony and dance. Until we furnish something as good in place of the Indian social dance, why rave about it? We might easily have a large number of low-spirited, sullen, and even dangerous Indians on our hands if it were not for these joyous occasions. So long as the dances are clean, can any one quarrel with a Ya-be-chai of the Navajo, a Corn Dance of the Hopi, or one of the Pueblo spectacles, half pagan, half Catholic? I have seen scores of such dances, not as a tourist, but as the man on the ground in charge, and I have not been able to figure out that they are one bit worse than a country picnic among our own bucolic population of Texas or South Dakota, for instance. I have seen a South Dakota Rotary Club cut as many fool antics as a Southwest Indian clan. I recall an illustration from my very short stay among the Sioux in 1922. It was the Fourth of July, and I had permitted the old Indians to hold their dance on the hills. It had long been the custom to stop their merrymaking at sunset, and a very good ruling too. But this Fourth was unusually quiet, the booze-runners not having appeared as per schedule. The Indians petitioned me to permit just a little dancing after nightfall. It had been very quiet, and my special police force was large enough, and seemed loyal enough, to assure good order. “All right,” I said. “But please remember that I shall have a squad of police there, and I shall be there myself; so don’t start any shines.”