The Mitchell capital. (Mitchell, Dakota [S.D.]) 1879-1918, 1907-09-13

is our White mans art a superficial.
Inadequate thing, alter 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 1t be more poetic. more roman
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
e%plendor, where only the keen of mind.
the pure of soul, NAV Craze?
In a word. is aboriginal art superior
to civilized art?
Ten years Angel Decora, a Winnie
bago Sioux girl, studied under leading
painters and sculptors-rnen like Pyle
and DeCamp and Grayson-trying hard
to see art in their way. and then cried
In deportation:
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 the Winnebago Sioux, thirty
miles from Sioux City, in q wigwam,
and when she was yet a child was
picked up by a stranger near her home
and taken for a 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 any one permission to
take her, SO she must ave been stolen.
Anyway she ound herself at Hampton.
Va, where She remained in the Indian
school a few years. then vent to the
Northampton school for girls in Massa-
chusetts, and then to Smith college.
Art was crying for her, n she
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
entity sought to turn the indian away
from his primeval instincts, to make
him do everything the white mans
way.
But row comes one of the most brill
liant. most progressive of the red race.
with he authority of the government
behind her and says:
You can never compensate my peo-
pie for what you h~ave.taken from them.
Like the baubles you ave given them
for the treasures Of their handicraft.
Won 1ruy nffn~ frn-, - IA, ~,
ton, with its vices and deceits and its
dollar stamp, and in exchange take
their poetry, their romance, their art.
things utterly beyond value"
Wen by Her Plea.
When Angel Decora, after ten years
of faithful effort to accommodate her
self to modern art, went to WASHINGTON
and laid her case before Francis e.
Leupp. commissioner of Indian affairs.
he was SO won by her plea that he sent
her to the Indian school at Carlisle,
Pa, with a special commission to re-
yive native art.
Not that the commissioner was con-
WINGED Of its superiority, but he be-
lieves in preserving all that is good.
n saw slipping away a thing which.
once gone, America would always
mourn.
1t was very much as If we as a ma
ton had lost our A B C's and all that
goes 10 make up our ~eGucatlOn, and a
great teacher came. without chart or
book or slate, and said: Search your
soul, and see whether the instinct that
is in you cannot call back What is
gone
OF all the hundreds Of students at
Carlisle not II has been initiated into
the mysteries of the old picture
writings. Yet their soul-yearnings, their
hereditary ambitions, their very phys
ical inclhlations, all urge them back, all
seek expression in some way different
from what they see all about them.
And the method of the Indian teach
er has been to gather about her these
grown children, to place in their hands
the crude tools ald materials that their
forbears Of wigwam days used, and to
say Here. taken them and build;
build anything o please: but put
YOU soul into it. and make 1t beauti-
full"
What do they rnake2 A.casual glance
abou that big studio at Carlisle re-
yea.ls only some partly finished -ugs on