| IT
is a far cry from a wigwam to Westminster, from a prairie
trail to the Tower Bridge, and London looks a strange
place to the Red Indian whose eyes still see the myriad
forest trees, even as they gaze across the Strand, and
whose feet still feel the clinging moccasin even among
the scores of clicking heels that hurry along the thoroughfares
of this camping-ground of the paleface.
So this is the place where dwells
the Great White Father, ruler of many lands, lodges,
and tribes, in the hollow of whose hands is the peace
that rests between the once hostile red man and white.
They call him the King of England, but to us, the powerful
Iroquois nation of the north, he is always the “Great
White Father.” For once he came to us in our far-off
Canadian reserves, and with his own hand fastened decorations
and medals on the buckskin coats of our oldest chiefs,
just because they and their fathers used their tomahawks
in battle in the cause of England. [Page 158]
So I, one of his loyal allies,
have come to see his camp, known to the white man as
London, his council which the whites call his Parliament,
where his sachems and chiefs make the laws of his tribes,
and to see his wigwam, know to the palefaces as Buckingham
Palace, but to the red man as the “Tepee of the
Great White Father.” And this is what I see:—
WHAT
THE INDIAN SEES.
Lifting
toward the sky are vast buildings of stone, not the
same kind of stone from which my forefathers fashioned
their carven pipes and corn-pounders, but a grayer,
grimier rock that would not take the polish we give
by fingers dipped in sturgeon oil, and long days of
friction with fine sand and deer-hide.
I
stand outside of the great palace wigwam, the huge council-house
by the river. My seeing eyes may mark them, but my heart’s
eyes are looking beyond all this wonderment, back to
the land I have left behind me. I picture the tepees
by the far Saskatchewan; there the tent poles, too,
are lifting skyward, and the smoke ascending through
them from the smouldering fires within curls softly
on the summer air. Against the blurred sweep of horizon
other camps etch their outlines, other bands of red
men with their herds of wild cattle have sought the
river lands. I hear the untamed hoofs thundering up
the prairie trail. [Page 159]
But the prairie sounds are slipping
away, and my ears catch other voices that rise above
the ceaseless throb about me—voices that are clear,
high, and calling; they float across the city like the
music of a thousand birds of passage beating their wings
through the night, crying and murmuring plaintively
as they journey northward. They are the voices of St.
Paul’s calling, calling me—St. Paul’s
where the paleface worships the Great Spirit, and through
whose portals he hopes to reach the Happy Hunting Grounds.
THE
GREAT SPIRIT.
As
I entered its doorways it seemed to me to be the everlasting
abiding-place of the white man’s Great Spirit.
The
music brooded everywhere. It beat in my ears like the
far-off cadences of the Sault Ste. Marie rapids, that
rise and leap and throb—like a storm hurling through
the fir forest—like the distant rising of an Indian
war-song; it swept up those mighty archways until the
gray dome above me faded, and in its place the stars
came out to look down, not on these paleface kneeling
worshippers, but on a band of stalwart, sinewy, copper-colored
devotees, my own people in my own land, who also assembled
to do honour to the Manitou of all nations.
The deep-throated organ and
the boys’ voices were gone; I heard instead the
melancholy incantations [Page 160] of
our own pagan religionists. The beautiful dignity of
our great sacrificial rites seemed to settle about me,
to enwrap me in its garment of solemnity and primitive
stateliness.
BEAT
OF THE DRUM.
The
atmosphere pulsed with the beat of the Indian drum,
the eerie penetrations of the turtle rattle that set
the time of the dancers’ feet. Dance? It is not
a dance, that marvellously slow, serpentine-like figure
with the soft swish, swish of moccasined feet, and the
faint jingling of elks’-teeth bracelets, keeping
rhythm with every footfall. It is not a dance, but an
invocation of motion. Why may we not worship with the
graceful movement of our feet? The paleface worships
by moving his lips and tongue; the difference is but
slight.
The
altar-lights of St. Paul’s glowed for me no more.
In their place flared the camp fires of the Onondaga
“long-house,” and the resinous scent of
the burning pine drifted across the fetid London air.
I saw the tall, copper-skinned fire-keeper of the Iroquois
council enter, the circle of light flung fitfully against
the black surrounding woods. I have seen their white
bishops, but none so regal, so august as he. His garb
of fringed buckskin and ermine was no more grotesque
than the vestments worn by the white preachers in high
places; he did not carry a book or a shining [Page
161] golden symbol, but from his splendid shoulders
was suspended a pure white lifeless dog.
Into the red flame the strong
hands gently lowered it, scores of reverent, blanketed
figures stood silent, awed, for it is the highest, holiest
festival of the year. Then the wild, strange chant arose—the
great pagan ritual was being intoned by the fire-keeper,
his weird, monotonous tones voicing this formula:
“The Great Spirit desires
no human sacrifice, but we, His children, must give
to Him that which is nearest our hearts and nearest
our lives. Only the spotless and stainless can enter
into His presence, only that which is purified by fire.
So do we offer to Him this spotless, innocent animal—this
white dog—a member of our household, a co-habitant
of our wigwam, and on the smoke that arises from the
purging fires will arise also the thanksgivings of all
those who desire that the Great Spirit in His happy
hunting grounds will forever smoke His pipe of peace,
for peace is between Him and His children for all time.”
The mournful voice ceases. Again
the hollow pulsing of the Indian drum, the purring,
flexible step of cushioned feet. I lift my head, which
has been bowed on the chair before me. It is St. Paul’s
after all—and the clear boy-voices rise above
the rich echoes of the organ. [Page 162]
|
