H. A. Stimson,
A. F. Sherrill,
S. R. Riggs
Wm. Crawford,
M. B. Wilder,
Joseph Hart,
E. P. Smith.
THE INDIAN QUESTION.
REV. H. A. STIMSON, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.
I stand before you to speak upon the Indian question with an inexpressible sadness. The hopelessness of securing justice or mercy for the Indian oppresses me. I seem to hear the cry of the Pilgrim’s saintly pastor, when the news came to him across the ocean of their first fight with the natives of New England, “I would that you had converted some before you killed any.” Our injustice and oppression of the Indian are not the slow growth of years, as they have been to-day shown to be in the case of the negro; they sprang into being full armed, bitter and destructive, like the spirits from Pandora’s box. As early as 1675 the devoted John Eliot wrote to Gov. Winthrop from the wigwams in which he was consecrating his culture and his life to their conversion: “I humbly request that one effect of this trouble may be to humble the English to do the Indians justice.” (Letter to Hon. Mr. Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut. Roxbury, this 24th of the fifth month, 1675.) The prayer has remained unanswered through the centuries.
I am oppressed with the necessity of arraigning my Government and my country of crime. It is but a short time since England was horrified with the account of the barbarous atrocities committed by an English governor upon the blacks of Jamaica. A committee was at once formed, as an expression of the best sentiment of England, for the purpose of bringing the perpetrators of the crime to justice. Reviewing the work of the Jamaica committee, of which he had been chairman, John Stuart Mill records its failure. It was defeated not by the law, but by the grand jury, the representatives of the people. “It was not a popular proceeding,” he writes, “in the eyes of the great middle classes of England to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed against negroes.” (Autobiography, pp. 296-9.) It is as unpopular to arraign our Government for abuse of the Indian to-day. A single sentence, however, of Mr. Mill’s gives me courage to proceed. He says: “The Lord Chief Justice Cockburn’s charge settled the law for the future.” It may be that some simple statements of fact may open the eyes of our people and prepare the way for redress.
Early in the century Sidney Smith said of the English nation, in reference to the possibility of converting the Hindoos to Christ: “We have exemplified in our public conduct every crime of which human nature is capable.” Those words stand to-day the terms of the indictment of the United States in her dealings with the Indians.
We have persistently broken faith with them. A volume of testimony might readily be produced; but Gen. Leake’s able setting forth of the history of our Indian treaties furnishes all the proof necessary. But as a single illustration, take this statement from a Government official. In seven of our most important treaties with as many different tribes we have bound ourselves to provide education for the children of those tribes. At a low estimate there are 33,000 children of schoolable age. The Government has provided accommodations for but 2,589. Add 5,082 as the number who may possibly be further accommodated in the miserable makeshifts of transient day schools, and you have but 7,671 as the total provision. (Letter of Acting Indian Commissioner Brooks, April 28, 1879.)
But why begin this story? We have made the name Modoc one to frighten children with for a generation; but the Modoc chief who killed the brave Gen. Canby had first been himself betrayed, and had his kindred killed under a U.S. flag of truce; and his women had been violated and burned to death. (Bishop Whipple’s letter to N. Y. Evening Post, Jan., 1879.) We fought the Nez Perces; and when that able and manly chief Joseph surrendered, he did it on conditions the flagrant violation of which on the part of our Government is known to every Indian on the plains. (Mr. Tibball’s letter of October 9, 1879, in N. Y. Tribune.) We have justified the sneers with which Sitting Bull dismissed Assistant Secretary Cowan in a council held before the outbreak of the last Sioux war: “Return to your own land, and when you have found a white man who does not lie, come back.” We furnished occasion for the sorrowful words of the old chief who, after the Custer massacre, came to the Whipple Commission on the Missouri and said: “Look out there. The prairie is wet with the blood of the white man. I hear the voices of beautiful women crying for their husbands, who will never return. It is not an Indian war. It is a white man’s war, for the white man has lied. Take this pipe to the great Father and tell him to smoke it, for it is the pipe of truth.”