160 W. CARSON RYAN, JR. 



ditions, finds no proof of racial inferiority or superiority and eliminates the usual methods 

 of determining such standing from the field of scientific usefulness. 2 



The everyday experience of supervisors and teachers in our Government 

 Indian schools tends more and more to confirm these conclusions. "I find 

 young children the same everywhere," says one of the veteran teachers 

 among the Apaches; "they have the same curiosity, the same open minds, 

 the same trustfulness, the same sense of satisfaction in having found out 

 something new." In schools on the Pima reservation in Arizona this year 

 whole classrooms of Indian children measured up to the normal grade for 

 white children or above it. The supervisor for this region reports that half 

 the Pima children (and this is preponderatingly a full-blood area) are not 

 retarded when educational achievement is compared with chronological age — 

 "some are a few months behind, most are a few months ahead." 



ii 



Whatever the answer may be to the more or less academic question of 

 innate intelligence, there can be no doubt of the significance of Indian con- 

 tributions to civilization. Herbert J. Spinden speaks of "a heritage of util- 

 ity beyond the dreams of avarice" — referring particularly to the inestimable 

 food plants which Indians brought from the wild to a high state of domesti- 

 cation. He reminds us, however, that the Indian "has prepared a second 

 heritage of beauty, a gift of fine arts, illusions, and immaterial creations 

 which rise above mere utilities as the mountains rise above the plain," and 

 it is in this realm of the fine arts that Indians of today have the greatest 

 possibilities. Just as the Welsh look to the Mabinogion and the English 

 find in the Arthurian romance a never-failing inspiration, so, Spinden main- 

 tains, "Americans of the future will surely realize an epic grandeur in the 

 song sequences and world stories of the first Americans. The Night Chant 

 of the Navajo and the Hako of the Omaha will take their place in the fore- 

 land of our national literature as mysterious and beautiful dramas which 

 somehow prefigure the American ideal." He calls the Indian "a true artist 

 unusually qualified by natural abilities in several provinces of esthetic ex- 

 pression," with dramatic ceremonies that combine music, dancing, and 

 pageantry with the use of words in the form of poetry and imaginative 

 prose. He finds him gifted in applications of color and design, "retaining 

 an ancient but evergrowing skill in the homecrafts of weaving and pottery- 

 making and in the illimitable fields of painting and sculpture." 3 



2 Yoder, Dale. Present status of the question of racial differences. Journal of edu- 

 cational psychology, 19: 463-70. October 1928. 



3 Spinden, Herbert J. Fine art and the first Americans. Exposition of tribal Indian 

 arts, New York, 1931. (Monograph.) 



