CHAPTER XXXV 



INDIAN CHARMS 



By 



James Rodway, 

 Curator of the Georgetown Museum 



To the native Indian his beenas are of the utmost im- 

 portance — he can do nothing without them. They assure 

 success in all his undertakings, and must have done much to 

 make him happy. There is a tendency in other races to de- 

 pend on fate, good luck, charms, amulets and praj^ers, but 

 only the South American Indian has adopted beenas. Fail- 

 ure in attaining some desirable object drives other people 

 to curse, and find fault with something or somebody; the 

 Indian is hardly ever angry. His failure to shoot a labba 

 or deer is due to something connected with his beenas for 

 those animals. Perhaps their virtue has been exhausted and 

 he must reinoculate himself to restore it, or a woman may 

 have touched those he used. But he does not abuse or scold 

 his wife, dog or gun, but tries quietly to put the thing right. 

 He is not much of a thinker, and yet he chooses a similar 

 course to that of a rational man. A blundering, passionate 

 fellow vents his spite on all around, but the man with a well 

 balanced mind tries to find out the cause of a failure. Of 

 course we may say that the Indian's way is absurd, but it is 

 not nearly as absurd as that of the fault-finder or the scold. 



Some of the ideas connected with beenas are pretty and 

 almost poetical. Take, for example, the sololio or swallow 

 beena. It is a caladium with white dots, suggesting flights 

 of birds, in fact it recalls the line of the poet, 



"When the swallows homeward fly." 



The idea of the sociability of these birds does not come 

 to the Indian from Europe, but has no doubt been spon- 



