Yet this is by no means all the charge I have to make against my own race in its treatment of the Indian. Not content with depriving him of his worldly possessions, we have added insult to injury, and administered a far deeper and more cutting wound to him by denying to him and his wives and daughters the moral, poetical, and spiritual qualities they possess. To many of the superior (!) race this is utter nonsense. The idea that an Indian has any feelings to be hurt! How ridiculous! Yet I make the assertion, fearless of successful contradiction, that many Indians feel more keenly this ignoring of the good, the poetic, the æsthetic, the religious or spiritual qualities they possess than they do the physical wrongs that have been inflicted upon them. As a race, we are prejudiced, bigoted, and “big-headed” when looking upon any other race. We come by our prejudices naturally. The Englishman looks down upon the “frog-eating Frenchman,” and used to say he could lick ten or a dozen such. The Frenchman and Englishman both scoff at the beer-drinking German and the stolid Dutchman, yet France has to remember Sedan, and England still smarts at the name of Van Tromp. The fact is that no nation can afford to look down upon another, any more than any civilization can afford to crow over another. Each has its own virtues, its own “goods,” its own advantages. France, England, Germany, America, have never equaled, much less surpassed, the architecture of Greece, Egypt, and Rome. The United States, with all its brag and boast, has never had a poet equal to old blind Homer or the Italian Dante. Germany’s Goethe is worthy to stand side by side with England’s Shakspere, and the architecture of the rude and vulgar “Goths” is the supremest crown of all building in the proud and conceited English-speaking “Mother Country.” And so have I learned to look at the Indian. He has many things that we can take to our advantage and profit, and some of these have been presented in the following pages. In the next chapter I have a few necessary reservations and observations to make which I trust the patience of the reader will permit him carefully to consider. CHAPTER II THE WHITE RACE AND ITS CIVILIZATION I am by no means a blind worshiper of our so-called “higher” and “advanced” civilization. I do not think we have advanced yet as far as the Greeks in some things. Our civilization, in many respects, is sham, shoddy, gingerbread, tinsel, false, showy, meretricious, deceptive. If I were making this book an arraignment of our civilization there would be no lack of counts in the indictment, and a plethora of evidence could be found to justify each charge. [Illustration: INDIAN BEADWORK OF RATTLESNAKE DESIGN].