You Can Surmise Also,
For It Was A Crude Time And The Land Was Raw, That The Women Became
In Turn The Game Of The Conquerors.
There used to be in the Little Antelope a she dog, stray or
outcast, that had a litter in some forsaken lair, and ranged and
foraged for them, slinking savage and afraid, remembering and
mistrusting humankind, wistful, lean, and sufficient for her young.
I have thought Seyavi might have had days like that, and have had
perfect leave to think, since she will not talk of it. Paiutes
have the art of reducing life to its lowest ebb and yet saving it
alive on grasshoppers, lizards, and strange herbs; and that time
must have left no shift untried. It lasted long enough for Seyavi
to have evolved the philosophy of life which I have set down at the
beginning. She had gone beyond learning to do for her son, and
learned to believe it worth while.
In our kind of society, when a woman ceases to alter the
fashion of her hair, you guess that she has passed the crisis of
her experience. If she goes on crimping and uncrimping with the
changing mode, it is safe to suppose she has never come up against
anything too big for her. The Indian woman gets nearly the same
personal note in the pattern of her baskets. Not that she does not
make all kinds, carriers, water-bottles, and cradles,--these
are kitchen ware,--but her works of art are all of the same piece.
Seyavi made flaring, flat-bottomed bowls, cooking pots really, when
cooking was done by dropping hot stones into water-tight food
baskets, and for decoration a design in colored bark of the
procession of plumed crests of the valley quail. In this pattern
she had made cooking pots in the golden spring of her wedding year,
when the quail went up two and two to their resting places about
the foot of Oppapago. In this fashion she made them when, after
pillage, it was possible to reinstate the housewifely crafts.
Quail ran then in the Black Rock by hundreds,--so you will still
find them in fortunate years,--and in the famine time the women cut
their long hair to make snares when the flocks came morning and
evening to the springs.
Seyavi made baskets for love and sold them for money, in a
generation that preferred iron pots for utility. Every Indian
woman is an artist,--sees, feels, creates, but does not
philosophize about her processes. Seyavi's bowls are wonders of
technical precision, inside and out, the palm finds no fault with
them, but the subtlest appeal is in the sense that warns us of
humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl.
There used to be an Indian woman at Olancha who made bottle-neck
trinket baskets in the rattlesnake pattern, and could accommodate
the design to the swelling bowl and flat shoulder of the basket
without sensible disproportion, and so cleverly that you
might own one a year without thinking how it was done;
but Seyavi's baskets had a touch beyond cleverness.
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