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58 from following the ideas as they deserve. And if we ourselves understand them, we do not change the fact that the old conditions for these people have vanished.

In New Mexico and Arizona, on the other hand, we have Indians living in the country very largely according to the customs of their ancestors. Many a person who has admired their work in the Museum of Natural History in New York or the Field Museum in Chicago—to say nothing of the great collections in Europe—has been surprised to learn that these Indians have not degenerated into the tame pensioners of the reservations, but are in the essentials of character, very much what they were in the past. The best proof of this is their art: at its best to-day it is equal to the best they ever produced. All the centuries of contact with white men have not sufficed to blot it out or even to give it the hybrid quality that one finds, for example, with the Hawaiians. The Spaniards conquered the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and priests from their settlements in Mexico taught their faith to the Indians, who are Catholics to-day. But the Church has been content with such acceptance of its tenets as could easily be given by a people who hold to their ancestral mythology and to the arts which express their beliefs of the sun, the clouds, the earth, and their relationships.

So tolerant and gentle was the mingling of the European and American religions that when the Indians painted certain subjects they had learned to know from the Spanish priests, they made a really important addition to Christian art. The Santa Fé Museum has a number of examples of this imagery; in the Brooklyn Museum is a St. Francis that shows in impressive fashion the capability of the Indians to work with a foreign theme. The idea of the work was derived, doubtless, from some decadent specimen of late Spanish painting, for the religious pictures one finds in the region are characteristic "export articles" of the poor quality that has given the term its meaning. Nothing more different from such a model could be imagined than the Indian painting, for the newly aroused race, direct and vigorous in expression, infuses the work with a purity and an austere beauty quite worthy of a European primitive.

As interesting as one must find this type of picture, it is the autochthonic art of the Indians that is important. It attains the dignity that inheres in national and religious things, for it belongs to the whole of the people and informs every phase of their lives, from