Another thing that I would have white women learn from their Indian sisters, is a thing they used to know but are rapidly forgetting. That is, the joy of suckling their own children. An Indian mother that does not suckle her own child is almost unknown. With the “superior classes” of the white race it is the opposite of this proposition that is true. Not only is this of great injury to the child, but it is fraught with most serious consequences to the mother. Is it nothing that the mother of a child willfully puts away from herself all the little, fond, sweet intimacies that naturally grow out of this relationship; the joy of exercise of a natural and beautiful function; the feeling that the baby life is still being sustained by the mother’s own life-blood transmuted by mother love and mother-processes into sweet, delicious food that nothing else can equal? [Illustration: A DILIGENT HOPI BASKET WEAVER, WHO IS ALSO A GOOD MOTHER.] It is a fact that all the higher affections and emotions of the human soul have to be cultivated and developed. The child sees little or no beauty in a sunset; it must be trained to recognize it. The love of Nature grows as we cultivate it. The nobler emotions of self-sacrifice, humility, kindliness, grow as we cultivate them, and while, where maternity is a perfectly natural process, joy accompanies it in all its manifestations, there is no denying the fact that in our so-called civilization women have to cultivate the feelings connected with the function to bring to themselves the joy they should normally possess. But that there is a joy in suckling one’s own child many, many mothers--true mothers--have assured me, and I wish to add my voice to the supplications of the innocent child that every mother give of her own sweet, loving breast to the child she has brought into the world. Some mothers refuse because it destroys the beautiful contour of the bust; others because it demands too close confinement, and would therefore prohibit regular attendance upon club or social functions. Poor women! Bartering their God-given rights and privileges for the messes of pottage that society and club life afford--that is, afford to mothers at the time they should be with their babes. Can any society on earth, any club that ever existed, compensate for the loss of healthful nutrition given from a loving mother’s breast? Let the statistics of “bottle-fed” babies attest the dangers that accrue from the mother’s refusal (or inability--for which she is to be pitied rather than condemned) to suckle her own young. [Illustration: A PROUD AND HAPPY WALLAPI MOTHER.] [Illustration: A HOPI BABY WHO HAS NEVER YET KNOWN CLOTHES.] CHAPTER XVII THE INDIAN AND THE SANCTITY OF NUDITY