Shuswap people

“ I was puzzled, for I did not know of anything done by the government that might have provoked such a question. So I looked inquiringly at the agent, who whispered: “I do not know what he can mean. These Indians have very strange notions sometimes.”
I then turned to White Thunder and said: “Why do you say that the Great Father does not trust you? Here I am. Your people are many thousands. I have come among you, not with an army, but alone, accompanied only by a few friends. Is not this proof enough that I have confidence in you? What stronger proof would you have?” ”

“ The Swatis besought him to come and live in their valley. After dignified and diplomatic reluctance, he consented to exchange the banks of the Indus for those of the Swat. For some years, he lived in the green valley, and enjoyed the reverence of its people. At the time of the great mutiny, Said Akbar, the King of Swat, died, and the saint succeeded to the temporal as well as the spiritual authority. In 1863 he preached the Jehad against the British, and headed the Swatis and Bunerwals in the Ambeyla campaign. ”

“ Conversely, if the shadow is a vital part of a man or an animal, it may under certain circumstances be as hazardous to be touched by it as it would be to come into contact with the person or animal. Hence the savage makes it a rule to shun the shadow of certain persons whom for various reasons he regards as sources of dangerous influence. Amongst the dangerous classes he commonly ranks mourners and women in general, but especially his mother-in-law. The Shuswap Indians think that the shadow of a mourner falling upon a person would make him sick. ”

“ Cheadle came upon an outlying fragment of the Shushwap race, without horses or dogs, sheltering themselves under rude temporary slants of bark or matting, falling year by year into lower misery, and rapidly dying out; this is another example of the degeneration which no doubt has lowered or destroyed many a savage people. ”

“ Prisoners of war, not killed by torture, are made slaves, but they are few in number, and their children are adopted into the victorious tribe. Hereditary slavery and the slave-trade are unknown. The Shushwaps are said to have no slaves. ”

“ All the mystery of the white man, all the fearful poetry of the white man, so far as it exists in the eyes of these savages, consists in the fact that we do not do such things. The Zulus point at us and say, “Observe the advent of these inexplicable demi-gods, these magicians, who do not cut off the noses of their enemies.” The Soudanese say to each other, “This hardy people never flogs its servants; it is superior to the simplest and most obvious human pleasures.” ”

“ A nation can do the same. The Shoshones have many brave children in the prairies of the South; they have many more on the borders of the Yankees. All of them think and speak like their ancestors; they are the same people. Now would it not be good and wise to have all these brave grandchildren and grand-nephews as your neighbours and allies, instead of the Crows, the Cayuses, and the Umbiquas? Yes, it would. Who would dare to come from the north across a country inhabited by the warlike Comanches, or from the south and the rising sun, through the wigwams of the Apaches? ”

“ On the other side of the river we saw the straggling village of Shushot, and at the time I thought to myself what miserable wretches the people must be who live there with no thought of ever going beyond its precincts, such as could never attempt to make a trip like ours, or even dream of it. ”

“ That is to say, that these tribes, hastening on as they are doing to the collapse of their tribal organizations, have nothing else to stem the universal undermining that is going on, always with acceleration, than the creeds, moral code, habits, customs, social and political systems of Western Civilization, that is, the equipment of a people differing essentially,—physically, morally, and intellectually. ”

“ You could not but expect to see among the people at large some who did not exactly approve the methods pursued by the Government. To them the policy of the Government sometimes appeared too radical and hazardous, and thus one group or another showed from time to time their dissent. In those days when people were determined to assume a dissenting attitude, it generally took the shape of physical force, in other word, "revolt." Chosiu itself had had two such revolts, but they had been easily crushed. ”

“ Swoboda replied to the last assertion, "The young count treats all his dependants with a kindly consideration that it would be difficult to match. If his people suffer from any injustice it certainly is without his knowledge ”

“ To begin with, by what exact right do we call people like the Zulus savages? Setting aside the habit of polygamy, which, after all, is common among very highly civilised peoples in the East, they have a social system not unlike our own. ”

“ His letters to Schouvalof, the imperial chamberlain, attest the unremitting industry with which he sought for every kind of information that might be useful to him. ‘The enlightened spirit which now reigns among the principal nations of Europe, requires that we should go to the bottom, where in former times a historian barely thought it worth while to skim the surface. People wish to know how a nation grew together; what was its population before the epoch of which you treat ”

“ There is no instinct among the Zulus stronger than that of desiring to do what everybody else is doing. Such arises, no doubt, from the force of long-continued custom. Living, as they once did, under the rule of as despotic kings as could be found anywhere on the globe, whose political and social habits made all sorts of demands on the people, they became alive to the necessity of being always on the alert for fear of being punished unless conforming to what others were doing. ”

“ Though originally the same people, their dialect varies very perceptibly from that of the Tushepaws: their treatment to us differed much from the kind and disinterested services of the Shoshonees: they are indeed selfish and avaricious; they part very reluctantly with every article of food or clothing; and while they expect a recompense for every service however small, do not concern themselves about reciprocating any presents we may give them. ”

“ Superficially so like them all, and so eager to outdo them in detachment and adaptability, ridiculing the prejudices he had shaken off, and the people to whom he belonged, he still kept, under his easy pliancy, the skeleton of old faiths and old fashions. “He talks every language as well as the rest of us,” Susy had once said of him, “but at least he talks one language better than the others”; ”

“ It is a dangerous thing to play with fire, so it is said; it is a more dangerous thing to walk rough-shod over Oriental customs. A man ere this has lost his life by carrying his shoe-leather across the threshold of a mosque, and this sort of thing William Sowerby knew, and of his knowledge he heeded. He did not heed another thing, however; which is, that Oriental ladies are at home to but one man in all the world, and that your acquaintance with them must be modified by a mushrabieh screen, a yashmak, a shaded, fast-driving brougham, and a hideous eunuch. ”

“ To annihilate reason, or at least to subordinate it to feeling; to attack liberty, in order to subject the whole of life to love; and, furthermore, the blind abandoning of self—such is the aim of Sufism, as it is of all Mystic philosophy.
The doctrine of the Sufis has been set forth in a great number of treatises, notably that of Sohrawdi. God alone exists; He is in everything and everything is in Him. All beings emanate from Him, without being really distinct from Him. The world exists for all eternity; the material is only an illusion of the senses. ”

“ Modern research has proved that the origin of Sūfism cannot be traced back to a single definite cause, and has thereby discredited the sweeping generalisations which represent it, for instance, as a reaction of the Aryan mind against a conquering Semitic religion, and as the product, essentially, of Indian or Persian thought. ”

“ As a rule the young people marry young, after the stolid fashion of Indians. They approve of polygamy, but seldom do you find a man with more than one squaw, simply because the women do not contribute materially and primarily to the support of the family, [Pg 65] and attend only to the accessory duties of it; thus it becomes an increased tax upon the dull energies of the savage whenever he adds an extra woman to his household. The squaws are all well treated everywhere up here; they have just as much to say as their lords and masters whenever the occasion of buying, selling, or hiring arises ”

“ The whole of Sūfism rests on the belief that when the individual self is lost, the Universal Self is found, or, in religious language, that ecstasy affords the only means by which the soul can directly communicate and become united with God. Asceticism, purification, love, gnosis, saintship—all the leading ideas of Sūfism—are developed from this cardinal principle. ”

“ Chuang-tzŭ condemns all this as so much foolish, wordy babble, saying that the Sophists would argue with each other in a circle ceaselessly, puzzling people's minds to no purpose, and simply bent on showing off their own cleverness in disputation. His criticism on the arch-Sophist Hui Shih is dignified and to the point. "He talks away about everything without reflecting; the more he talks the farther he is from finishing. If he were to confine his attention to one thing only, it would be well enough ”

“ Of men born for battle, to whose ears the roar of cannon and the clash of sabres are the only music, the smoke of conflict their native atmosphere, Suwarrow (Suvarof, to give him his Russian name) stands among the foremost. A little, wrinkled, stooping man, five feet four inches in height and sickly in appearance, he was the last to whom one would have looked for great deeds in war or mighty exploits in the embattled field. ”

“ Absorption in God, therefore, or union with Him is the goal of all the Sufi teachings and practices. The entire negation of self clears the way for the apprehension of the Truth. This journey towards God has its stages which are generally given as eight in number: service, love, abstraction, knowledge, ecstasy, truth, union, extinction. Some of the Sufis went so far as to set aside external religion, and showed an utter indifference to the ritual as well as to the moral law. Al-Ghazali was not of their number. ”

“ But the whole purpose of Sūfism, the Way of the dervish, is to give him an escape from this prison, an apocalypse of the Seventy Thousand Veils, a recovery of the original unity with The One, while still in this body. The body is not to be put off; it is to be refined and made spiritual—a help and not a hindrance to the spirit. ”

“ Who are the majority? Why the poor. If laws were made for the rich and powerful, such laws would not suit the community at large. Mashallah! there are no laws for pachas, who have only to believe that there is one God and Mahomet is his prophet. Does your slave say well?"
"Excellently well, Mustapha," replied the pacha, lifting the pitcher to his mouth for a minute, and then passing it to Mustapha. ”

“ I said, there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth, in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law, that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now, in this case, I, who am the right owner, lie under two great disadvantages; ”

“ No Muslim State makes a national profession of Súfíism.
In spite of all its dogmatic utterances, in spite of much that is sublime in its idea of the search after light and truth, Súfíism ends in utter negation of all separate existence. The pantheism of the Súfís, this esoteric doctrine of Islám, as a moral doctrine leads to the same conclusions as materialism, "the negation of human liberty, the indifference to actions and the legitimacy of all temporal enjoyments." ”

“ There are many men in this country, I am told, who make Soofieism their profession, but who are in reality hypocrites to the world, and their Maker: actuated sometimes by the love of applause from the multitude, but oftener, I am assured, by mercenary motives. A Soofie enjoying public favour may, if he choose, command any man's wealth who gives credit to his supposed power. All men pay a marked deference to his holy character, and few would have the temerity to withhold the desired sum, however inconvenient to bestow, should the demand be made by one professing to be a Soofie. ”

“ They saw what every Westerner sees to-day,—illimitable reaches of prairie and ravine, forested hills sloping to mighty rivers, and open meadow-lands watered by streams looped like a ribbon. They saw a land waiting for its people, wealth waiting for possessors, an empire waiting for the nation builders. ”

“ He is very human; but his humanity is deeply ethical in character.
Much more than Omar and Sa'di, Háfiz was a thorough Sufi. "In one and the same song you write of wine, of Sufism, and of the object of your affection," is what Sháh Shuja said to him once. In fact, we are often at an entire loss to tell where reality ends and Sufic vacuity commences. For this Mystic philosophy that we call Sufism patched up a sort of peace between the old Persian and the conquering Mohammedan. ”