Progress for my People

Extract

We think of the Indian as our problem. We think of him as a biological entity within our collectivity. He is not exactly the proletariat, the working class of our society. He is the underdog, the outcast, the untouchable.

We admire the sheer ability of the Indian to live as an animal, to procreate his image without change century after century, to lie drunk in the cool soft air of the Andes muttering bad words and supplications to the virgin and all the pagan gods. “The Indian always works slowly, at a retarded rhythm, a monotonous and unchangeable beat. Never, or very rarely, can he be seen running, jumping, excited, realizing rapid action, violent, energetic, of nervous impulse. In his music, in his dance, in his song, we see the repercussion of this physical state and from it the sobbing monotony of his cultural manifestations. The reciprocal action of the physiological on the psychological and vice versa complete the group of factors that account for the morbid languor in which the Indian vegetates.” Yet despite all of this the Indian is eternal. Since he does not enter into the cycle of evolution, of progress, he neither lives in the true sense of civilization, nor does he die. This phenomena of stagnant purely biological existence may be explained from many points of view.