The Word Carrier of Santee Normal Training School (Santee, Nebraska), 1920-05 - 1920-06

              the Word Carrier
of SANTEE NORMAL TRAINING SCHOOL.
VOLUME  XLIX
HELPING THE  RIGHT, EXPOSING THE "WRONG.
NUMBER 3
SANTEE, NEBRASKA.
MAY-JUNE, 1920
FIFTY CENTS PER YEAR
Our Platform
For Indians we want American Education ! We
want American Homes! We want American Rights!
The result of which is American Citizenship \ And
the Gospel is the Power of God for their Salvation !
An American Indian Artist
A NOTED American illustrator, Mr.
\\L&> Howard Pyle, was once asked if he ever had "a
^real genius" for a pupil.
He answered, "Yes,
I had—once. But
unfortunately she was a
woman, and still more unfortunately an American Indian. She
was so retiring that she always kept in
the background of my classes. When
I tried to rouse her ambition by telling
her how famous she might become, she
answered: ' We Indian women are taught
that modesty is a woman's chief virtue."
It was this innate, retiring instinct that
held back "Hinook-Mahi'wi-Kilina'ka"
from greater efforts and from wider recognition. Known to the white world as
Angel De Cora (her name, ' 'Woman Coming on the Clouds in Glory," finding a
practical condensation in the single word
"Angel,") she was acclaimed by the few
to whom her gifts as decorator and designer
were fully revealed as an artist of strong originality and racial character. In her death the
Nation has lost a personality of unusual pic-
turesqueness and significance.
It was some forty years ago that Angel De
Cora was "caught wild," as she delighted to
describe it, on the Winnebago Reservation,
not long after her harassed tribe, uprooted
and driven ever further westward by the settlers' demands for their lands, had taken a final refuge near the friendly Omahas in Nebraska. The Indians were despairing and destitute, and it was from a seemingly hopeless future that the little "Woman Coming on the
Clouds" a shy, startled child, was rescued by a
kindly teacher of Hampton Institute and taken to General Armstrong's school in Virginia, where friends became interested in her and
her talent for drawing was allowed complete
freedom. After graduating from Hampton,
Angel enrolled in the drawing classes of Howard Pyle, the best-known illustrator of the
day. But it was not long before she left her
teacher because she found that all the pupils
copied their master.    "And I am an Indian,"
ANGEL DE CORA
she said, "and don't want to draw just like a
white man."
Angel always insisted that she had no more
talent than any other Indian woman. "My
people are natural craftsmen," she used to say.
"The Indian woman from prehistoric times
has been an artist. The work of her hand,
the product of her thought, has been enshrined in the white man's museums throughout
the world. Each basket, each pottery urn shaped by the Indian woman is an individual art
expression created by its maker. The imagination that prompts the symmetry and beauty
of pattern, and the dexterity that gives the
skill of perfect workmanship—these are inherent in every Indian. The only difference between me and the women on the reservation is
that I have chosen to apply my native Indian
gift in the white men's world. We are a race
of designers, aud I look for the day when our
art may be as generally recognized as that
of the Japanese, and when America will be
proud to have her Indians make beautiful
things for all the world."
Angel De Cora was sanguine; a potentiality
for art expression, even when practically applied to crafts and industries, is unfortunately
the very last thing that the mechanically minded American considers of the smallest value.
This is another reason why the gifted Indian
girl, with all that she stood for, passes to-day
without public recognition ; though she blazed
a new trail, she now treads the "Pathway of
Departed Spirits," wept only by the few (and
these either Indians or artists) who know how
rare was the quality of her work and
who realize how fruitful to the Indian
people and to America at large might yet
be the prophecy of her life.
Though she started her career by illustrating books of Indian tales, she later
looked down upon these early efforts, for
her greatest work lay in decorative design. It was in this field that my own
personal contact with her ripeued into
warm friendship. 1 was about to publish
my collection of Iudian songs and legends
decorated by original Indian drawings
and the names of the tribes represented.
Most of the drawings had been made on
the reservations by the old Indians, but
I asked Angel De Cora to make a design
for the title-page of her own tribe, the
Winnebago people. When she brought
me the finished page, it bore, in addition
to the design, the legend, "Lake Indians
—Winnebago," iu letters so beautiful
and of such startling originality that my
publishers declared: "We can't have
one page looking like this and the others
labeled with prosaic printing! We must
have this sort of lettering all through the
book. We will show this to our designer
upstairs and ask him to copy this style."
"Our Designer" looked at the page and
gave a low whistle. ' 'I never saw anything
like this in my life before," he said. "Whoever did that lettering is a genius ! Don't ask
me to make letters like that. I really advise
you to get the person who did this page to do
all the others."
"You would be surprized," I said to  the
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designer, "to know that the 'genius' is a
young Indian girl!"
He thought a minute, then said, "Well, no,
I am not really surprized, because no white
man could have done this."
This was true for the letters were, not conceived as letters; the Indian girl had looked
on them as so many different shapes and as
structural ideas for decorative forms. And
the forms were Indian.
"Take my advice," said the designer again.
"Get that girl to do all the lettering in the book
and you will have something unlike anything
that's ever been done with the alp habet before.''
So the order was given ; but when the pages
came back we found to our astonishment that
the lettering was not in the least like that with
which Angel had decorated the Winnebago
section. She had invented a different kind of
lettering for every Indian picture, and the
forms of the letters were composed of motifs
Continued on next page, 2nd column