FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF SANTEE.
BY MISS EDITH LEONARD.
An outside view of any community is always different from an inside view, yet both may be true. I am going to try to give you some of the impressions I received of the Santee school, during the first days that I spent here, before I began to feel that I was a part of it.
The teachers and scholars were just returning after vacation. The teachers seemed especially happy in meeting the scholars and one another, and beginning work again. I had never known a company of people with so much care who seemed so light hearted and hopeful, and I thought “They love their work.”
The boys and girls seemed happy, too, and when I looked at their faces in the chapel and met them later in the home and school, I found in many of them a gentleness and frankness, a trustfulness and willingness to be taught, that surprised me. I had looked for less of these qualities than in white children, but I found more than would be found in most white schools.
Their reverence and attention in church, too, was in striking contrast with what I have seen in many places where the children seem to take no part in the worship. These children always take the attitude of devotion during prayer, and sit quietly and with serious demeanor through three or four services on Sunday. They seem to enjoy it, too, even when there is a part that they imperfectly understand, on account of the use of two languages in these services. They love Bible stories and hymns, and accept what they are taught concerning religious things, with a simplicity that I have been used to finding only in the youngest. Perhaps it is because they are so shut in by themselves here. They know little of the indifference or half concealed hostility to religious truth that is so common in larger communities, even among those who attend church regularly.
During the first weeks here, while our windows were constantly open, I was struck by the amount of singing I heard. From more than one of the houses where the scholars live I could hear the hymn sung at morning prayers; then came the voices of the school in their opening exercises, and later of the music classes. Beside this we often heard the boys and girls singing in recreation hours for pleasure, and again at night before retiring, their evening hymn. The sacred words and the young voices could not fail to bring good thoughts, and I was reminded of Luther’s saying, “The devil always flies from music, especially sacred music, because he is a gloomy spirit, and cannot bear joy and gladness.”
I am conscious that after three months here I see many things in a different light from that in which I first saw them. I have learned that there are some peculiar hindrances to teaching the Indians, so that it is by no means always easy. I have learned, also, that the teachers, with all their happiness in their work, see enough of sickness and ignorance and evil many times to make their hearts ache.
Yet the cheerful view I received at first was not a false one. There is more to make one sad here than in many other places, but there is also much to make one glad. There is the constant contact with young life, the opportunity to see how much the every-day blessings of home and school are worth to those who have not had them, the sympathy that comes from a common purpose frankly avowed, and in addition there are abundant opportunities and favorable conditions for teaching these boys and girls to love Christ, and to feel concerning themselves,
“He’s fitting us to enter
Into His service sweet.”
I think nearly all who are here, both teachers and scholars, feel that this lonely little cluster of buildings away off on an Indian reservation, is, for them, one of the best places the earth contains.