| HOW
well I remember my first meeting with Tekahionwake,
the Indian girl! I see her yet as she stood in all ways
the ideal type of her race, lithe and active, with clean-cut
aquiline features, olive-red complexion and long dark
hair; but developed by her white-man training so that
the shy Indian girl had given place to the alert, resourceful
world-woman, at home equally in the salons of the rich
and learned or in the stern of the birch canoe, where,
with paddle poised, she was in absolute and fearless
control, watching, warring and winning against the grim
rocks that grinned out of the white rapids to tear the
frail craft and mangle its daring rider.
We
met at the private view of one of my own pictures. It
was a wolf scene, and Tekahionwake, quickly sensing
the painter’s sympathy with the Wolf, claimed
him as a Medicine Brother, for she herself was of the
Wolf Clan of the Mohawks. The little silver token she
gave me then is not to be gauged or appraised by any
craftsman method known to trade.
From
that day, twenty odd years ago, our friendship continued
to the end, and it is the last sad privilege of brotherhood
to write this brief comment on her personality. I do
it with a special insight, for I am charged with a message
from Tekahionwake herself. “Never let anyone call
me a white woman,” she said. “There are
those who think they pay me a compliment in saying that
I am just like a white woman. My aim, my joy, my [Page
5] pride is to sing the glories of my own people.
Ours was the race that gave the world its measure of
heroism, its standard of physical prowess. Ours was
the race that taught the world that avarice veiled by
any name is crime. Ours were the people of the blue
air and the green woods, and ours the faith that taught
men to live without greed and to die without fear. Ours
were the fighting men that, man to man—yes, one
to three—could meet and win against the world.
But for our few numbers, our simple faith that others
were as true as we to keep their honor bright and hold
as bond inviolable their plighted world, we should have
owned America to-day.”
If
the spirit of Wetamoo, the beautiful woman Sachem, the
Boadicea of New England, ever came back, it must have
been in Tekahionwake the Mohawk. The fortitude and the
eloquence of the Narragansett Chieftainess were born
again in the Iroquois maiden; she typified the spirit
of her people that flung itself against the advancing
tide of white encroachment even as a falcon might fling
himself against a horde of crows whose strength was
their numbers and whose numbers were without end, so
all his wondrous effort was made vain.
“The Riders of the Plains,”
the “Legends of Vancouver,” “Flint
and Feather,” and the present volume, “Shagganappi,”
all tell of the spirit that tells them. Love of the
blessed life of blue air without gold-lust is felt in
the line and the inter-line, with joy in the beauty
of beaver stream, tamarac swamp, shad-bush and drifting
cloud, and faith in the creed of her fathers, that saw
the Great Spirit in all things and that reverenced Him
at all times, and over and above it all the sad note
that tells of a proud race, conscious that it has been
crushed by numbers, that its day is over and its heritage
gone forever.
Oh, reader of the alien race,
keep this in mind: remember that no people ever ride
the wave’s crest unceasingly. The time must come
for us to go down, and when it [Page 6] comes
may we have the strength to meet our fate with such
fortitude and silent dignity as did the Red Man his.
“Oh, why have your people
forced on me the name of Pauline Johnson?” she
said. “Was not my Indian name good enough? Do
you think you help us by bidding us to forget our blood?
by teaching us to cast off all memory of our high ideals
and our glorious past? I am an Indian. My pen and my
life I devote to the memory of my own people. Forget
that I was Pauline Johnson, but remember always that
I was Tekahionwake, the Mohawk that humbly aspired to
be the saga singer of her people, the bard of the noblest
folk the world has ever seen, the sad historian of her
own heroic race.”
ERNEST
THOMPSON SETON.
[Page
7]
|
