"None. There they teach us many things, but seldom can an Indian get work in the large cities. A white man is always given the first chance; that is natural. I learned wood-carving. Perhaps if I went far away and waited long I might have been able to work at my trade; but my old grandfather and grandmother were alone here with my little sister. How could I stay away from them? So here I am, and here I will stay. It is my home; I like it best."
"It is well that you look at it in that way if it must be so. It appears to me there are hundreds of thousands uselessly spent in the Indian schools every year."
"That is very true," said the young man. "How much better to have them on the reservations, where are all the people together, where all could help each other and learn from each other. What a fertile soil is this, for instance. How much could be done here! There are many places like this. But now—it is a bad job, a very bad job."
"I agree with you," said Mr. Page. "It is a very bad job."
"I tell you," said the boy, "there are three kinds of Indians who come from those schools. One is ashamed of his people and will not live with them any longer. There is not much for him to do anywhere, so he rambles about from place to place. The whites despise him; for his own people he has lost all his good heart. He dies after awhile, always a sot and a thief. There is another kind of Indian. He is discontented because he has been out in the world that does not want him. He comes back and remains with his people; but what he has seen and done when away makes him not content with his home. Always there is sorrow in his heart while he lives. If they had not taken him away from his home he would have remained content. Do I not say right—according to your belief?"
"Yes," said Mr. Page, "you do."
"And there is still another kind—the lazy one who comes home and sneers at everything, and yet is too lazy to go away and look for something better. Pretty soon he gets lower than those at whom he laughs and sneers. He lives on the labor of his women—his mother, a sister, or wife, when he gets one—until he dies. You cannot change the Indian; if you attempt it you spoil him."
Mr. Page was surprised at the extraordinary good sense of the young man.
"You have a wise head on your shoulders," he said. "I do not wonder that with very good intentions, perhaps, they selected you for Carlisle. At any rate, they have taught you to reason."
"To reason!" echoed Dionysio, with a flash of the eye and contemptuous curl of the lip that betrayed the latent deep Indian nature. "The Indian could reason long before he ever saw the face of the white man—and can do it to-day better than his teachers. I am not very old, but that much I have seen and I know."