The Indian To-day: The Past and Future of the First AmericanEastman, Charles A.
History
The Indian To-day: The Past and Future of the First American
Eastman, Charles A.
Indians of North America
Yes, the world has recognized his type, seized his point of view. We
have lived to see monuments erected to his memory. The painter,
sculptor, author, scientist, preacher, all have found in him a model
worthy of study and serious presentation. Lorado Taft's colossal "Black
Hawk" stands wrapped in his stony blanket upon the banks of the Rock
River; while the Indian is to keep company with the Goddess of Liberty
in New York Harbor, besides many other statues of him which
pre-eminently adorn the public parks and halls of our cities.
No longer does the red man live alone in the blood-curdling pages of the
sensational story-writer. He is the subject of profound study as a man,
a philosopher, a noble type both physically and spiritually. Symmetrical
and finely poised in body, the same is true of his character. He stands
naked before you, scorning the garb of deception and pretence, for he is
a true child of nature.
How has he contributed to the world's progress? By his personal
faithfulness to duty and devotion to a trust. He has not advertised his
faithfulness nor made capital of his honor. Again and again he has
proved his worth as a citizen of his country and of the world by his
constancy in the face of hardship and death. Racial antagonism was to
him no excuse for breaking his word. This simplicity and fairness has
cost him dear; it cost his country and his freedom, even the extinction
of his race as a separate and peculiar people; but as a type, an ideal,
he lives and will live!
The red man's genius for military tactics and strategy has been admitted
again and again by those who have fought against him, often unwillingly,
because they saw that he was in the right. His long, unequal struggle
against the dominant race has produced a brilliant array of notable men
without education in letters. Such were King Philip of the Wampanoags;
Pontiac, the great Ottawa; Cornplanter of the Senecas, in the eighteenth
century; while in the first half of the nineteenth we have Weatherford
of the Creeks, Tecumseh of the Shawnees, Little Turtle of the Miamis,
Wabashaw and Wanatan of the Sioux, Black Hawk of the Foxes, Osceola of
the Seminoles. During the last half of the century there arose another
set of Indian leaders, the last of their type--such men as Ouray of the
Utes, Geronimo of the Apaches, Red Cloud, Spotted Tail, and Sitting Bull
of the Sioux, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perces, and Dull Knife of the
Northern Cheyennes. Men like these are an ornament to any country.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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