ipe,
Santo Domingo, San Ildefonso, Taos, Tesuque, and all the other tribes
of the west and the southwest, the same unified sense of beauty
prevails, and in some of the dances to a most remarkable degree. For
instance, in a large pueblo like Santo Domingo, you have the dance
composed of nearly three hundred people, two hundred of whom form the
dance contingent, the other third a chorus, probably the largest
singing chorus in the entire redman population of America. In a small
pueblo like Tesuque, the theme is beautifully represented by from
three to a dozen individuals, all of them excellent performers in
various ways. The same quality and the same character, the same sense
of beauty, prevails in all of them.

It is the little pueblo of Tesuque which has just finished its series
of Christmas dances--a four-day festival celebrating with all but
impeccable mastery the various identities which have meant so much to
them both physically and spiritually--that I would here cite as an
example. It is well known that once gesture is organized, it requires
but a handful of people to represent multitude; and this lonely
handful of redmen in the pueblo of Tesuque, numbering at most but
seventy-five or eighty individuals, lessened, as is the case with all
the pueblos of the country to a tragical degree by the recent
invasions of the influenza epidemic, showed the interested observer,
in groups of five or a dozen dancers and soloists including drummers,
through the incomparable pageantry of the buffalo, the eagle, the
snowbird, and other varying types of small dances, the mastery of the
redman in the art of gesture, the art of symbolized pantomimic
expression. It is the buffalo, the eagle, and the deer dances that
show you their essential greatness as artists. You find a species of
rhythm so perfected in its relation to racial interpretation as hardly
to admit of witnessing ever again the copied varieties of dancing such
as we whites of the present hour are familiar with. It is nothing
short of captivating artistry of first excellence, and we are familiar
with nothing that equals it outside the Negro syncopation which we
now know so well, and from which we have borrowed all we have of
native expression.

If we had the redman sense of time in our system, we would be better
able to express ourselves. We are notoriously unorganized in esthetic
conception, and what we appreciate most is merely the athletic phase
of bodily expression, w