I can't be both Indian and white. I will not be like the sun
when the shadow cuts across it and the land grows dark. I will not be
half-breed. I will be white or I will be Indian; and I will be white,
white only. My heart is white, my tongue is white, I think, I feel, as
white people think and feel. What they wish, I wish; as they live, I
live; as white women dress, I dress."
She involuntarily drew up the dark red skirt she wore, showing a white
petticoat and a pair of fine stockings on an ankle as shapely as she had
ever seen among all the white women she knew. She drew herself up with
pride, and her body had a grace and ease which the white woman's
convention had not cramped.
Yet, with all her protests, no one would have thought her English. She
might have been Spanish, or Italian, or Roumanian, or Slav, though
nothing of her Indian blood showed in purely Indian characteristics, and
something sparkled in her, gave a radiance to her face and figure which
the storm and struggle in her did not smother. The white women of Portage
la Drome were too blind, too prejudiced, to see all that she really was,
and admiring white men could do little, for Pauline would have nothing to
do with them till the women met her absolutely as an equal; and from the
other halfbreeds, who intermarried with each other and were content to
take a lower place than the pure whites, she held aloof, save when any of
them was ill or in trouble.
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