THE MENTOR 1917.11.01, No. 142,
Bolivia

The Native Bolivian

The Indian of the Bolivian plateau is still only a half-civilizedman and less than half a Christian. Heretains his primeval Nature worship, which groups togetherthe spirits that dwell in mountains, rivers, and rocks withthe spirits of his ancestors, revering and propitiating all asAchachilas. In the same ceremony his medicine man invokesthe Christian “Dios” to favor the building of a house, orwhatever he undertakes, and simultaneously invokes theAchachilas, propitiating them also by offerings, the giftmade to the Earth Spirit being buried in the soil. Similarlyhe retains the ceremonial dances of heathendom, andhas secret dancing guilds, of whose mysteries the whiteman can learn nothing.

His morality is what it was, in theory and practice, fourcenturies ago. He neither loves nor hates, but fears,the white man, and the white man neither loves nor hates,but despises him; there being some fear mingled with thecontempt. Intermarriage between pure Indians and pureEuropeans is very uncommon. They are held togetherneither by social relations nor by political, but by the needwhich the white landowner has for the Indian’s laborand by the power of long habit, which has made the Indianacquiesce in his subjection as a rent payer.

Neither of them ever refers to the Spanish Conquest.The white man does not honor the memory of Pizarro;to the Indian the story is too dim and distant to affect hismind. Nor is it the least remarkable feature of the situationthat the mestizo, or half-breed, forms no link betweenthe races. He prefers to speak Spanish which the Indianrarely understands. He is held to belong to the upperrace, which is, for social and political purpose, though notby right of numbers, the Peruvian or Bolivian nation.

JAMES BRYCE.

From “South America, Observations and Impressions.”