REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS.
The Second Annual Report of Commissioner Atkins is a candid and comprehensive document, dealing briefly but frankly with the several problems growing out of the relations of the Government to the Indians. We have not space for a review of the Report, but we wish to call special attention to the facts which it incidentally presents as to the neglect of Congress, and especially of the House of Representatives, to act upon a number of important bills touching Indian affairs. No less than eight such bills are mentioned—six of them passed the Senate, but failed to receive final action in the House—and some of these are by far the most essential to the welfare of the Indians. Three of these bills we wish particularly to name: The Dawes’ Bill for the Allotment of Lands in Severalty; the Sioux Bill for the Division of the great Sioux Reservation into six reservations; and the Bill for the Relief of the Mission Indians in California. The first of these is fundamental to the settlement of the Indians in separate homes, and consequently to their becoming American citizens; the second has the same end in view; and the third is a simple act of justice, long and shamefully deferred, to the suffering and deserving Indians, whose sad case has been so pathetically depicted by Mrs. Helen Hunt Jackson in her touching story of Romona.
We ask attention to these bills for a practical purpose. Congress should be urged to act upon them at once. The present session is the short one, ending March 4th. If this session closes without passing these bills, the whole subject will be deferred almost indefinitely. The next Congress will be a new one; the Members to some extent will be new; the committees maybe wholly so, and they may need years of petitioning, educating and inspiring to move them to proper action on these essential topics. No time can be lost. No influence is so great upon the average Congressman as letters directly from his constituents. We therefore urge every reader of these pages to write at once to the Member of Congress from his district, or to others whom he may know, asking for prompt and energetic efforts for the passage of these bills.
On another page of The Missionary will be found the admirable address of President Seelye, presenting the paramount importance of religious effort on the part of the churches in behalf of the Indians. We are in full accord with this view. But the Government has also its responsibilities, and all that it does in the lines we have suggested will only facilitate the work of preparing the Indians for what we wish them all ultimately to be, intelligent, self-supporting Christian citizens.