THE INDIAN PROBLEM.
ADDRESS OF PRES. JULIUS H. SEELYE, D.D., AT NEW HAVEN.
The whole number of Indians in the United States, including Alaska, probably is not far from 300,000, of whom about one-half now wear citizen’s dress, and about one-fourth speak the English language sufficiently to be understood. Some of these people are citizens, and some are wards of the nation. They differ from each other as they differ from us, in their languages and thoughts and ways. They represent nearly every grade of civilized and savage life. Their original rights to a large portion of our national domain we have recognized by purchase and by treaties, which have plighted the faith of the nation for their protection and support. We certainly desire to live in peace with them, but with many of them we are in constant danger of war. What shall we do with them and for them? How shall we wisely maintain our rights respecting them, and at the same time righteously fulfill our obligations? How shall the Indian cease to disturb us, and become a blessing to the nation?
There is really but one solution to the Indian problem, though many have been prominently attempted. We have tried to force the Indian. We have fought him. We have shut him in upon reservations. We have made a pretence of feeding and clothing him. We have tried our hand at civilization, have built school-houses, provided teachers, and gathered Indian children together, and taught them the rudiments of learning. We have furnished them with implements and helps to agriculture, and some of the mechanic arts. But the results, it must be admitted, are not re-assuring. When we fight Indians, they fight too, and their fighting is apt to be, in proportion to their numbers, much more successful than ours. In the Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1868, there is an estimate of the expenditure of some late Indian wars, from which we learn that it has cost the United States Government on an average one million of dollars, and the lives of twenty-five white men to kill an Indian. “There is no good Indian but a dead Indian,” said Gen. Sheridan, Lieutenant-general of our army, but the process of making the Indians good in this way is at least a costly one, and the prospect of success can hardly be considered hopeful.
It may be doubted whether any Governmental efforts yet made to subdue or civilize these people have essentially improved either the Indians themselves or their relations to us. Indian wars have not made the Indians peaceable; Indian schools have not civilized them; Indian rations and reservations have not satisfied the requirements of even their bodily comfort and sustenance; and the proposal now made and loudly advocated, of breaking up all their tribal privileges and allotting the property of the tribe to the members of the tribe in severalty, while encompassed by grave difficulties from the ignorance of the Indian and his need of guardianship, would endanger that sense of common rights and privileges, that communal relationship, on which not only the very existence of human society depends, but in which is the germ of whatever is distinctively human. We are not educated up to our individual rights in spite of our communal relations, but because of these.
I am not speaking here of what Governmental efforts should have been, or should now be, but I speak of the actual facts of the past and the present, and I say that the Governmental procedure thus far, instead of solving the Indian problem, has only increased prodigiously the difficulty of its solution. Incidents illustrative of this might be cited by the hour, but would be impertinent in an audience as intelligent as that here assembled.
And yet the solution of the Indian problem is not a matter of theory or of speculation, but is an accomplished fact. It has been wrought out before our eyes. Wild, savage Indian tribes, as fierce, as lawless, as intractable as any now existing, have been tamed, have been taught the arts and ways of peace, have subjected themselves to law, and are now living in orderly, peaceable, industrious communities. The Cherokees, and the Delawares and Shawnees now united with them, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, the Creeks, and the Seminoles—who are known as the five civilized tribes—now have their constitutions and laws, their supreme court and their district courts, their well-arranged public school system, and “indeed every provision of law and organization requisite in a State founded on the consent of the governed, controlled by officers chosen by the people, and suited to an advancing civilization,” (U.S. Senate Rep., I.: XVII.). Pauperism among them is unknown, and, by the best reports, crime is less frequent in proportion to numbers than among the adjoining whites. The Report of the United States Senate Committee on Indian Affairs made to the Senate July 4, 1886, says of the Cherokee nation, that “it is difficult, after a searching criticism, to point out any serious defects in their constitution or statutes. In some respects several of our State constitutions could be amended with advantage by adopting some of the provisions of the Cherokee constitution. Their situation, and that of each of the five tribes, was full of difficulties, but they have met them skillfully.” (I.: XVII.)
“Fifty years ago,” in the language of this same report, “these five nations—now blessed with a Christian civilization, in which many thousands are active and intelligent workers, while the common sentiment of the whole people reverently supports their efforts, and approves their influence—were pagans.”
Fifty years ago the Sioux, now gathered at Santee and Sissiton, in Christian communities and homes and schools, with churches enrolled on the same records as those of New York and Philadelphia, in connection with Presbytery and Synod and General Assembly, were savage hordes, roaming through the Northwest as wild as the wildest. These savages have been changed. The facts are before our eyes. How was the transformation wrought? The answer is clear. No one can, no one does, mistake it. The United States Senate Report, from which I have quoted, acknowledges these to be the results of Christian missions. Where the Government has totally failed, the voluntary efforts of the churches have been crowned with this success. The preaching of the Gospel has done this work, and it alone. This ought not to surprise us. It will not surprise any historical student. The same agency by which our ancestors have gained their law and liberty and civilization—who a few centuries ago were savages and cannibals, offering human sacrifices, hanging the skulls of their slain enemies in their houses and using them as drinking-cups in their feasts—the same agency by which in our time the cannibals of the Fijis, and the cruel tribes of Madagascar, have found themselves possessed of a peaceable and progressive civilization, has broken the darkness and rolled away the shadows from these Indian tribes, as quietly, as peacefully and as gloriously as the coming of the sun has brought in the morning. Only the changes which in our ancestors required centuries for their accomplishment, have been wrought among these Indians in as many decades.
Here is the solution of the Indian problem—the only solution—and here is the work to which we are to gird ourselves afresh. Our first great work, the work which holds in itself all other agencies for Indian civilization, as the oak is held in the acorn, is the preaching of the Gospel to these people, the patient, earnest, loving presentation to them of the glad tidings that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Instruction in letters, instruction even in virtue is idle without this, and with this all other instruction follows as flowers open at the sunshine. The great trouble with us, brethren, is we are too unbelieving in the efficacy of the Gospel. We seek to supplement it; we think it needs other things; we forget that the Gospel is, and that it alone is, the power of God unto salvation, and we forget, too, what a broad term salvation is, that it covers the godliness which hath the promise of the life that now is, as well as of that which is to come. The Gospel of Christ is the power of God unto the salvation of the body, the salvation of the intellect, the salvation of manners and customs, the salvation of society, and it is this power to every one that believeth, to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. What wonders it has wrought! What wonders it is working now! How would every difficulty in our social state, our vice and crime and poverty, our selfishness and sensuality and woe, all disappear if the Gospel only dwelt among us, a living principle in every heart! We need no other evidence of its divine all-sufficiency than the adaptation it has already shown to every human need, and we need no other motive to its proclamation than the privilege of being co-worker with Him, “Who shall deliver the needy when he crieth, the poor also, and him that hath no helper. He shall spare the poor and the needy, and shall save the soul of the needy. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence, and precious shall their blood be in his sight.”