The Breaking of the Bread

During the years of white settlement along the American frontier, the ensuing wars with the American Indian seemed to always result in the victimization of the most innocent of participants. As children are our most precious commodity, the Indians often took vulnerable captives to replenish losses suffered in warfare as well as to hold for ransom or use for bargaining power. The white man too took hostages to pacify tribal leadership who would dare challenge the “manifest destiny” of white American expansion.
The women and especially children who were most frequently abused during the early American frontier days, I trust, at times somehow rose above their less humanistic leaders. Who knows if the Indian child in this scene was swept up by a white soldier or simply beckoned into the universal arms of a life-giving mother who found her lost and alone in the wilderness. “The Breaking of the Bread” calls upon that cosmic humanity in all of us, where no child is a commodity but simply of consummate worth in her or his own human right.