Indians, Then & Now

TIXIER'S TRAVELS ON THE OSAGE PRAIRIES --Edifed by John Francis McDermo// --University of Oklahoma Press ($3).

As LONG AS THE GRASS SHALL GROW--Oliver La Farge--Alliance ($2.50).

Victor Tixier was a young French doctor and amateur artist who wanted to see the country he had read of in Chateaubriand and Fenimore Cooper. Starting on a rather conventional Grand Tour, he quit it to spend the summer of 1840 among the Osage Indians: in Nion-Chou, the greatest of their villages; in their summer hunt for bison; in their skirmishes with the subtle, horse-stealing Pawnees. His book, published in France in 1844, is now published in English for the first time, with his few, expert Indian drawings and excellent notes. It has caught, between the doctor's and the draftsman's eye, a remarkable amount about the U. S. a century ago; particularly about the Indians. For one who would look into their vanished world it is a window as exact and serene as a glass-bottomed boat.

There were at that time about 3,000 of the Osage. Already they had withdrawn well west of the Mississippi, and already they wore U. S. store blankets, not buffalo robes; but they still retained most of the shapes of their freedom and integrity. Their government was a neat interlocking of democracy and absolutism; their discipline in conference moved Tixier to admiration; their use of property was virtually without problems. Their wealth was in horses. The poor were the guests of the rich at their own desire; upon request, any hunter yielded up to half of any animal he had killed, including the choice of cut.

The men were handsome, the women well-built but ugly; the popgutted children were masterful horsemen at six. They swarmed with vermin. They kept droves of fierce, useless dogs who got at the meat supplies, bit legs. Each brave took as many wives as he could buy and support; there were no love matches. They were extremely lascivious. By their manner toward him Tixier concluded that sodomy was common. The only Osage who showed kindness to his wife offered her to Tixier for the night for $10. Tixier pretended not to understand him.

On the hunt, along the "woodless prairies" beyond the Arkansas River, their venison often spoiled for lack of fuel to cook it. Indian police whipped the noisy and the neck-craners into discipline when game was near. They were skillful shots; one bullet or one arrow per bison was usually enough. Tixier predicted the extinction of the bison; the Osage killed them at random, usually left 150 Ib. of excellent meat on each carcass.

Less fierce than the Comanches or the Shawnees, they were by no means timid. They spent four days of dancing with clayed faces, of solemn Homeric boasting, building up to war. Scalps were the premium, but the glory was in guile, and a leader was less honored for scalps than for bringing back his own warriors alive. Their religion and their warfare were profoundly related; one of Tixier's most moving passages tells of the last solemn ceremonies with the warbirds. Their apathy in easy times, their resourcefulness and stamina under stress were both beyond the measure of white men.

Indians are different today. Oliver La Farge's sentimentally illustrated book is a short (140page) angry account of the crimes which the U. S. has committed against them since their vanquishing, of the reforms that have begun to take shape within the past few years. Possibly the most grievous crime has been the elimination of every possibility of stress: the strong tensions of hunting, free wandering, warfare have been long replaced by the lethal depressants of poverty, ostracism, boredom.

Taken from their parents at the age of six, Indian children have been subjected to execrable' food and housing, cruel discipline, the most rudimentary education, an absolute taboo on their native language, continuous propaganda to despise their parents, their religion, their legends, their arts, their race. Through the Allotment Act (1887) the reservations were so checkered and subdivided that free movement, tribal unity, and cattle raising became impossible. Of tribal funds held in trust the Government spent 93% on "administrative costs." Every stratagem was worked to acquire for white use key lands along watercourses without which the surrounding territory was useless. In 1887 Indians held 139,000,000 acres, in 1933 47,000,000, much of it arid. Rural slums grew (and persist) near the agencies, where Government rations float the Indians just above starvation. As for the rich "oil royalty" Indians (Tixier's Osages) they amount to less than "one per cent of a people thousands of whom would look upon a hundred dollars a year as a substantial raise." Basis of reform is the Indian Reorganization Act, six years old. With its protection former hunting and war tribes are working out a supportable existence in cattle ranching; the Blackfeet are at--but not over--the threshold of self-support ; the Flatheads have defended and developed a power site of which they were to be robbed. Ninety-eight tribes and bands have organized local governments; 67 have incorporated for business purposes. But the Act and its administrators are under constant and increasing attack, may be destroyed by any new President.

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