Forest City press. (Forest City, Potter County, D.T. [S.D.]) 1883-19??, 1907-09-05

Is our white mans art q superficial,
Inadequate thing, after all.
We paint and model with the excel
lent tools and mediums that an age
of invention makes poSsible-and FOR
what? Principally to initiate nature,
which cannot be improved upon.
Would it be more poetic, more oman
tic. to revert to those curious symbol
isms and crude expressions by which
primitive peoples sought, not pictorial
effects. but to tell wonderful stories. to
lead one into fairy pastures of ethereal
splendor, where only the keen of mind,
the pure of soul, NAV Craze?
In n word. is aboriginal art superior
to civilized art?
Ten years Angel Decora, a Winnie
baso Sioux girl. studied under leading
painters and sculptors-men like Pyle
and DeCamp and Grayson-trying hard
to see art in their way, and then cried
in desperation:
Away with your white mans art;
our primitive way was best
Moreover. she has SO impressed the
White fathers sitting in Washington
who are charged with the care of our
swarthy wards, that she has been as
signed to revive native Indian art in
the United States at government eX-
pense.
And this she is doing at the Carlisle,
Pa, Indian school
Miss Decora was born on a reserva-
ton of tine Winnebago Sioux, thirty
miles from Sioux City, in a wigwam,
and when she was yet a child was
picked up by a stranger near her home
and taken for u long ride in the steam
cars.
Must Have Been Stolen.
When she hunted up her mother in
later life she was told that her parents
had not given n one permission to
take her, so she must have been stolen.
Anyway she found herself at Hampton,
Va. where she remained in the Indian
school a few years. then went to the
Northampton school for girls in Massa-
chusetts, and then to Smith college.
thought she might become a landscape
painter. So she went to- the Drexel
school in Philadelphia, and later studied
under various private instructors.
One of the greatest artists under
whom she worked for a long time was
Howard Pyle, and while yet in Phila-
delphia she studied with Clifford p.
.Grayson, the sculptor Crafty and D.. w.
Train.
Then she went to Boston and studied
with Joseph DeCamp, Edna c. Tarbell
and Benson.
For many years. in fact ever since the
government has come to admit that a
good Indian need not necessarily be a
dead one. we have religiously. consist
emily sought to turn the Indian away
from MS pTlHeVdl llSulllCtS, 10 make
him do everything the white mans
way.
But now comes n of the most bril-
liant. most progressive of the red race,
with the authority of the government
behind her n says:
You can never compensate my peo-
pie for what you have taken from them.
Like the baubles you rave given them
for the treasures OF their handicraft,
you now offer them a paltry civiliza-
ton, with its vices and deceits and its
dollar stamp, and in exchange take
their poetry. their romance. their art,
things utterly beyond value"
Won by Her Plea.
When Angel Decora. after ten years
of faithful effort to accommodate her.
and laid her case before Francis E.
Leupp. commissioner of Indian affairs,
he was sc won by her plea that he sent
her to the Indian school at Carlisle,
Pa, with a special commission 10 re-
vive native art.
No that the commissioner was con-
vinced Of it's superiority. but he be-
lieves in preserving all that is good,
and saw slipping away a thing which,
once gone, America would always
mourn.
It was very much as II we as a ma.
ton had lost our A B C's and all that
goes to make up education, and a
great teacher came. without chart O,
book or slate. and said: Search your
soul. and see whether the instinct thai
ts in you cannot call back what is
gone"
OF all the hundreds Of students a,
Carlisle not one has been initiated into