WHAT WE ARE DOING TO THE RED MAN.
Recent Abolishment of Tribal Rule in Indian
Territory Will Have Powerful
Effect for Good or Ill.
Are we all to be Indians? There are ethnologists who say that in successive generations the features of Americans are gradually succumbing to the persistent influence of their climatic environment; that a few centuries will see us a race, high-cheek-boned, Roman-nosed.
Frederick R. Burton touches the question in the London Sphere. He says:
As I have studied the Indian in the field I have been interested in speculating—in an unscientific way, for my research was not concerned with physical characteristics—on the possible chance of the Indian's features consequent upon his advancing civilization. Indeed, I have often thought, though imagined may be the better word, that in Indians of education I have observed a distinct softening of the traditional type and an approximation to the features of the European.
The Indian is becoming civilized very rapidly. His appearance has already undergone great change through his general disregard of native dress, and after a few generations of living indoors and under bowler hats, is it not reasonable to suppose that he will look more like the Yankee than he does now, and thus justify the anthropologist's theory by a reversal of the process of reasoning?
The Indian, indeed, is rapidly being absorbed. On the 4th of last March tribal government was abolished in the Indian Territory. The so-called Five Civilized Tribes, numbering, all told, one hundred and two thousand souls, and claiming to have enjoyed continuous independent civil government since long before Columbus discovered America, are now just plain citizens of the United States. The tribal land has been divided among them, to be owned by individuals in fee simple; the right to vote has been extended to them; their separate, independent constitutions, legislatures, and judiciaries have entirely disappeared.
The Rev. W.B. Humphrey, of New York, is president of the National Indian Association. Speaking of the changed position of the Indians, he said recently, as quoted by the New York Tribune:
The Indian has long been the "ward" of the government. Our statesmen have found this to be a mistake, for it relieves him of all responsibility of providing for himself or of taking care of himself. This policy was found to pauperize him and to unfit him for the competitions of civilized life. In fact it left him as much of a heathen as when our forefathers first discovered him, wandering in the woods or over prairies, the monarch of all he surveyed.
We have taken his land from him and pushed him beyond our frontier. But now that the country which was once his has been so fully settled up, there are no more frontiers over which we can push him. This being so, our statesmen have wisely decided to make the Indian an integral part of our Union. This they are doing by breaking up his tribal relation, giving him land in severalty as fast as he can be prevailed upon to accept it, and by giving him the ballot.
The Indian is thus having civilization thrust upon him all at once, though quite unprepared for its responsibilities. He is made the victim of the land grabber, the shyster lawyer, and the saloon keeper—powerful forces which he is unable to resist in his present condition.
Dr. Charles A. Eastman, a full-blooded Sioux, who has shown in his own development what the Indian may become with education, is quoted by the Tribune as saying:
I do not believe in trying to delay the inevitable absorption of my race into the dominant white race of this country. The sooner that absorption is accomplished, the sooner the "Indian question" comes to an end, the better it will be for all of us—and this desired result will surely be hastened by letting down the bars in Indian Territory. As for the liquor question, every individual Indian must solve that for himself, just as he must solve everything else, as an independent citizen of this country, not as a "ward," a condition that brought with it no responsibilities.
There are between two and three hundred thousand Indians in the United States altogether, but of real Indian customs and beliefs there is very little left. It is only the showman class that does the dances and wears feathers and beads, and all the rest of the masquerading that goes to make up some Buffalo Bill entertainment. But there is no sincerity in such manifestations now; the real reason underlying these things is buried in the past, when the Indian stood alone, the maker of his own laws and customs, and not a government ward.
Now the problem for my race is, how best to adapt itself to the conditions belonging to the white man's civilization, to make these his own, and, hence, to emancipate itself from its present degraded position. This will not be accomplished by insisting on the racial isolation, the government protection, that we have had heretofore.
It is a difficult problem, though, simply because the Indian character and tradition are so different from the dominant type of the white man, and thus so difficult of assimilation. During all the centuries of our existence as a people we have been accustomed to live under a system of pure Socialism. Every Indian fought and accumulated property for his tribe, not for himself. It was the tribal, not the individual, welfare that engrossed him. But the white man's world is different, and the Indian must undergo a fundamental change in order to adapt himself to it.
You see, as a race, we are absolutely ignorant of commercial matters, how to make money—and this is essentially an age of commercialism. The Indian is rather of a philosophical temperament, not practical, with very little artistic development. Some of us make good minor mechanics, carpenters, blacksmiths, etc. But the inherited tendency of the race is still away from the keen, matter-of-fact rivalry and hard-headed wisdom that is at the basis of the modern world's activity—trade.
Dr. Eastman is at present engaged in a unique task. Under the auspices of the government, he is renaming the Indians—going to the various Sioux reservations and giving to each person a practical name. When the old names are not too unwieldy he retains them; otherwise he at least tries to perpetuate in the new name some trace of the old.