They built; they did not destroy 



A REMARKABLE THING 



By Sol Tax 



Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago 



Acting Director, Center for the Study of Man, 



Smithsonian Institution 



From a luncheon address at the first annual meeting of the Foundation 

 of North American Indian Culture, Bismarck, North Dalcota, Decem- 

 ber 6, 196S. 



Wood earring of eagle and whale, by David Williams, Sr., Tlingit 

 Indian. Loaned by Indian Arts and Crafts Board. 



Those of us who bring the European heritage often have 

 feelings of guilt. We are proud that our fathers brought 

 forth two new nations dedicated to liberty and to equality. 

 But we know that it was not quite a virgin wilderness from 

 which Canada and the U.S.A. were born. The American 

 Indians who came thousands of years before had done a re- 

 markable thing, relating human needs to the natural world 

 in every corner of this continent. On the Pacific coast they 

 learned how to live with salmon without destroying the sal- 

 mon — and this required a marvelous technology. Just so 

 Eskimos and Indians learned to live in the arctic, and made 

 all of the inventions that were needed. In California it was 

 acorns, which cannot be eaten unless men learn first to leech 

 out the bitterness. In the Southwest the Indians learned 

 to live with the desert, in the South and East with the great 

 forests. Here on the plains the miracle was no less, for they 

 showed us how the setded agricultural life of the river beds 

 could combine with life on the high plains where man could 

 live with buffalo. In every case they built; they did not 

 destroy. They combined nature, man, and God into a har- 

 monious whole. When Spaniards brought the horse to 

 Mexico the Indians showed well how they could weave the 

 new into the old. The horse almost instantly became in- 

 tegrally part of the older life, part of the harmony of man- 

 nature-spirit. In the days of their freedom the nations of In- 

 dians not only thrived, but they thrived by discovering how 

 to live with nature and with God without destroying either 

 — or themselves. They changed readily and sometimes rad- 

 ically, as their environments changed or they moved into 

 new areas or with the new discoveries they themselves made. 

 They were never lonely individuals because they belonged 

 to communities and each community was a moral order 

 built on a right way to live in harmony with fellow tribes- 

 men, which meant to live in harmony too with the greater 

 universe. We think now of these tribes having developed 

 "genuine" cultures: customs and ways and deep feeling 

 about the right way to live; beauty in everything made by 

 men because what was made was made with love and came 

 from and was part of the universe. 



Now, Europeans thousands of years ago took a different 

 path. We discovered how to conquer nature. It was an 

 act of will in our European tribal past that changed us 

 from the way of tribal peoples. We invented something 

 called "work," which is something from which we need 

 vacations, as though what needs to be done must be sepa- 

 rated from what we want to do. We also began to change 

 the earth, and to glory in changing it; and to treat nature 



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