SHALL INDIAN LORE BE SAVED? 



AN IMPERATIVE CALL FOR FIELD WORK BEFORE THE LAST 

 OF THE OLD BELIEFS AND OLD CUSTOMS ARE LOST 



By George Bird Grinnell 



ETHNOLOGICAL material for the North American continent — espe- 

 cially for the United States — is fast disappearing. It must be 

 gathered soon, or not at all. The longer its collection is postponed 

 the more vague and uncertain will be the results. Our Indians are changing 

 rapidly and to-day the vast majority of the individuals of each tribe have 

 forgotten the old beliefs and the old ways. The pressure of new ideas has 

 driven out the memory of the old things. 



It was never true that all the Indians of a tribe, or of a section of a tribe, 

 were well informed on the tribal traditions, beliefs and customs. All the 

 youth had the opportunity to learn, but some children and young people 

 were attentive to what they heard, thoughtful and possessed of good 

 memories ; others were heedless, unthinking, forgetful. To-day among the 

 younger Indians — those under forty years of age — there are few who can 

 give any connected account of the old ceremonies, while the detail and ritual 

 of those ceremonies is almost wholly lost. 



With the Plains tribes, it is only among the few remaining old men and 

 old women, who reached adult life while the tribes were still wandering free 

 and subsisting on the buffalo, that we find any real knowledge of the tribal 

 history, and of these old people some never knew and others have forgotten. 

 This is evident if one sits by when preparations are being made for some one 

 of the oldtime elaborate ceremonies and listens to the discussions and argu- 

 ments that take place about the forms to be gone through with. The men 

 of fifty or sixty years of age appeal to those of seventy or eighty for informa- 

 tion as to how certain things ought to be done according to the old customs, 

 or ask for the words of certain songs, forgotten by all but a few. These old 

 people, the only ones whose memory still carries so much of the mysterious 

 information of ancient times as has been handed down and remembered, 

 are dying very rapidly and are leaving few or none to take their place. The 

 young men, born since the Indians were brought onto reservations, and 

 obliged to attend schools, neither know nor care for the traditions of their 

 forefathers. Sometimes may be found a middle-aged man who, by tem- 

 perament or from some condition of his early life, is acquainted with old- 

 time things, but such men are very unusual. Therefore the springs of our 

 information are rapidly drying up. 



Besides that, two obstacles stand in the way of making valuable collec- 

 tions to-day; these obstacles are lack of money and lack of men. Money 

 may be supplied, of course. Men are much harder to find. The reason 

 for this is obvious. 



Young men interested in Indians and their lore may conscientiously try 



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