162 W. CARSON RYAN, JR. 



The claim is made for the art of the various Indian groups that in its philo- 

 sophic conception of life it is essentially different from modern individualism. 

 "It belongs to a world where expression is subservient to the 'idea,' " asserts 

 Alice Corbin Henderson in her monograph on Modern Indian Painting; 

 "where the forms of art are never collected or hoarded as such, but the idea 

 or image is tenaciously held and preserved through the centuries." 



Even though younger Indians have begun to work individually as artists, and to make- 

 water-color drawings independent of the ritualistic ceremonies, the old spirit still animates 

 their work and their point of view. Art is not, to them, individualistic self-expression, 

 not subjective, not precieux. It is as happily objective as making turquoise beads or 

 weaving a blanket. . . . These artists are a part of this living culture, and their work is a 

 reflection of a philosophy that feels every object magically alive — the deer with its exposed 

 breath-arrow, the basket or bowl with its breathing space, the hogan that must be breathed 

 and blest into life, the painting that must be magically created and that will still go on 

 living unless it is ceremonially destroyed. 



As for Indian poetry, Mary Austin finds it the key to Indian design and 

 perhaps to all Indian art — fundamentally associated with the processes of 

 living : 



There is a song when the newborn child is held up to the light, a song for the corn- 

 planting and one to bring the deer down from the mountain; a song for the building of the 

 house, for the cure of the sick, for the making of the bow, for the soul in departing. Friends 

 of the Indian are often accused of "poetizing" the Indian. But the truth is that this is 

 what he has done for himself, done it so completely that our failure to follow him on the 

 poetic level at which his important processes take place is the chief reason for our failure 

 to understand him. Nothing disconcerted him more than learning that the white man 

 could raise corn without singing over it; nothing has been more difficult of adjustment 

 than realizing that we can like his songs and not share their spiritual content. 



A still further Indian contribution to civilization, closely associated with 

 the esthetic and spiritual, is the social organization of the small community. 

 It is not merely that Indian social organization may be interesting histori- 

 cally to students of western democracy; it is rather that in its survivals of 

 community arts, village industry, and wholesome rural life, there may be 

 a way out for American industrialism with its mass production and mass 

 living. Tannenbaum and other students of modern Mexico have laid stress 

 on the deliberate effort there to build on native culture — on what Moises 

 Saenz calls "the cultural integration of the Indian." "The Indian tends 

 toward the corporate life which he lived for many ages in the past," says 

 John Collier. "As a member of a commune or corporation he is, relatively 

 speaking, satisfied, laborious, and ambitious, and his social frictions tend to 

 disappear. His whole nature, not merely his desire for property, adjusts into 



