OUR INDIAN WORK.
Never was there a more favorable time for enlargement on our part. The new impulse to the general cause by General Grant’s peace policy, augmented by the success of the schools at Hampton and Carlisle, will be still more accelerated by the schools soon to be completed by the Government at Chilloco, Indian Territory; Lawrence, Kansas; and Genoa, Neb. When these are finished and filled, the Indian schools throughout the country will accommodate 10,250 pupils of the 40,000 school population of the Indians at the present time. Sec. Teller may be too sanguine in the expectation that with adequate means the Indian problem will not be heard of in the next generation, but never before could such a prediction come so near being true. At all events, the nation and the Government are fully aroused, and it becomes the American Missionary Association to bestir itself to do its part. This Association has now the responsibility of doing the Indian work for the Congregational churches, the American Board having transferred to it the whole of its Indian missions. A delegation of the Executive Committee of the Association, consisting of Rev. W. H. Ward, D.D., Rev. Addison P. Foster, Charles L. Mead, Esq., and the Secretary, made recently a thorough inspection of all the schools and missions with very favorable impressions, a report of which follows.
Enlargement is imperatively needed in three directions, in addition to the $20,000 for the current work:
1. At the old and well-established mission at the Santee Agency, Nebraska, Rev. A. L. Riggs thus details the immediate wants of that station: additional industrial accommodations; extension of carpenter shop, $250; blacksmith shop, with five forges, $750; outfit of tools for the same, $150; general dining hall for 200 boarders, with laundry rooms, $5,000; outfit for the same, including heating arrangements, kitchen ranges, laundry apparatus, $1,500; making in all $7,650. Boarding-school house for girls at Oahe, Fort Sully, $2,500.
2. New mission stations and schools among the Indians now unsupplied. Three station buildings for native teachers on the Cheyenne River, $1,000; missionary’s house at Cherry Creek, Cheyenne River, $1,500; mission among the Crows, $2,000.
We invite the friends of Indian progress to select from the items above given in both fields of enlargement the specific object for completing which they will aid us in whole or in part.
3. An agricultural, mechanical and Normal School, to be founded perhaps somewhere in Peoria Bottom, a new Hampton located on the border, with the white man’s civilization on one hand and the Indian reservations close on the other. This, though it is an urgent want and essential to the filling out of our general plan, must await the careful search for a fitting location and the means to give it a suitable inauguration.
Where shall the work be done for the Indian? One successful teacher in Indian schools says that the children should all be brought East, and trained amid the white man’s civilization; another gentleman, long connected with a Mission Board, holds that the education should be given wholly among the tribes, so that the pupils would be trained amid their people and not away from sympathy with them. We believe both methods are necessary. The youth trained at home elevates his people as he rises, and is himself strengthened and helped by his friends who come from the East with the higher touch of the white man’s culture. Our schools and missions, those now in progress and the one proposed, afford the advantages of both plans. We shall aim to combine the industrial, normal and religious training so as to fit the pupils, male and female, for the practical duties of life in the field, the shop and the home, in the school room, in the pulpit and the church.
We have undertaken much. The hour has come for it, and we know that the friends of the Indian will not suffer us to fail for want of means.