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 them.  In all cases except one they were written down as they fell from the lips of the storyteller.  Sometimes I have transposed a sentence or two, or have added a few words of explanation; but the stories as here given are told in the words of the original narrators as nearly as it is possible to render those words into the simplest every-day English.  These are Indians’ stories, pictures of Indian life drawn by Indian artists, and showing this life from the Indian’s point of view.  Those who read these stories will have