ion
for another.

Americans are a conscientious people, yet they take no interest in these
frauds. They have the Anglo-Saxon spirit of fair play, which sympathizes
with weakness, yet no protest is made against the oppression which the
Indian suffers. They are generous; a famine in Ireland, Japan, or Russia
arouses the sympathy and calls forth the bounty of the nation, yet they
give no heed to the distress of the Indians, who are in the very midst of
them. They do not realize that Indians are human beings like themselves.

For this state of things there must be a reason, and this reason is to be
found, I believe, in the fact that practically no one has any personal
knowledge of the Indian race. The few who are acquainted with them are
neither writers nor public speakers, and for the most part would find it
easier to break a horse than to write a letter. If the general public knows
little of this race, those who legislate about them are equally
ignorant. From the congressional page who distributes the copies of a
pending bill, up through the representatives and senators who vote for it,
to the president whose signature makes the measure a law, all are entirely
unacquainted with this people or their needs.

Many stories about Indians have been written, some of which are interesting
and some, perhaps, true. All, however, have been written by civilized
people, and have thus of necessity been misleading. The reason for this is
plain. The white person who gives his idea of a story of Indian life
inevitably looks at things from the civilized point of view, and assigns to
the Indian such motives and feelings as govern the civilized man. But often
the feelings which lead an Indian to perform a particular action are not
those which would induce a white man to do the same thing, or if they are,
the train of reasoning which led up to the Indian's motive is not the
reasoning of the white man.

In a volume about the Pawnees,[1] I endeavored to show how Indians think
and feel by letting some of them tell their own stories in their own
fashion, and thus explain in their own way how they look at the every-day
occurrences of their life, what motives govern them, and how they reason.

[Footnote 1: Pawnee Hero Stories and Folk-Tales.]

In the present volume, I treat of another race of Indians in precisely the
same way. I give the Blackfoot stories as they have been told to me by the
Indians themselves, not elaborating nor adding to t