Abstract

In the Driftway

The Drifter has just paid a visit to the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, exhibited in New York City in December, and thereafter to be carried about the country, first to Philadelphia, and then to other cities, for many months. When he had seen and recognized anew these things, he saw something more. He watched, literally for hours, the efforts, of two Navajo sand painters, medicine men and artists, making pictures in sand that they had brought with them to New York from Arizona. The making of the sand painting is a religious ritual, the patterns are rigidly fixed and cannot vary, from childhood the painters are trained to a true eye and a firm wrist. And finally, when after a whole day of constant labor-in this case from ten in the morning to four in the afternoon- the picture is finished, the next part of the ritual consists in solemnly and irretrievably shuffling over it until it is obliterated.