All the rights and penalties of citizenship should be accorded to the Indian, as to the Italian, Irishman, and Negro.
The Indian should understand that this is a final settlement of his case, and that now he must shift for himself as other citizens have to do. With justice, and the protection and penalties of law awarded to him, let the Indian take his chances in the struggle of life. The germ of civilization is obedience to law. Put him under state and national law. The fittest will probably survive, Darwin or no Darwin.
So much for the Government. Then let Christianity, through its voluntary agencies, do the rest, as it well knows how to do, and is so grandly doing through the American Missionary Association. There are difficulties attending the execution of these suggestions. This consideration would require time that I have not at my disposal. They are not insuperable to a wise statesmanship.
When Dr. Riggs was visiting and preaching in the Indian Territory, one day there sat before him an old chief, nearly a hundred years of age, listening attentively. It was the missionary’s last sermon before leaving. When the service was over, the old man went up to Dr. Riggs, and reaching out his scrawny hand to the missionary’s snow-white beard, grasped it firmly, and turning him to the full sun-light gazed intently into his face for a long time. “What do you do that for?” at length said the Doctor. “Because I want to know you in the resurrection,” the old chief slowly replied. His people had been scattered, his children killed, his horses stolen, he had been driven from the home of his childhood to a strange land. While he waited to die, this noble old apostle, in whom Christ dwelt, crossed his pathway. The speech and tenderness were so strange, coming from a white man, that he wanted to be sure of recognizing him after death. “I want to know you in the resurrection.” How many white men will the Indians want to meet in the resurrection? It is time these awful wrongs were righted. It is time we learned with the wise fool in A Fool’s Errand, “The remedy for darkness is light; for ignorance, knowledge; for wrong, righteousness.” It is time the people were roused. It is time a tide of public opinion, demanding justice for the Indian, was rolled in upon our rulers, too strong to be longer resisted. If the Government never reforms until the people demand it, let us be sure that we voice our part of that demand, loud and clear, at once and unmistakably.
LETTER FROM GENERAL FISK.
[It was anticipated up to a late day by the committee of arrangements that General Fisk would be present at the meeting and would make an address upon the Indian Report. In his unexpected and compelled absence he kindly sent the following letter:]
It is almost two hundred and fifty years since Captain John Mason, at the head of ninety men, more than half of the fighting force of the Connecticut Colony, marched against Sassacus, and almost within bow-shot of where your Annual Meeting is to be held, fought the Pequods. It was the first Indian war in New England. Thomas Hooker, “the light of the Western Churches,” famed as “a son of thunder,” delivered to Mason the staff of command. The very learned and godly Stone spent nearly the whole night in importunate prayer for success to crown the expedition, which on the morrow sailed past the Thames, hoping by strategy to reach the Pequod fort unobserved. Under cover of night, the soldiers of Connecticut made the attack upon the Indians. “We must burn them,” shouted Mason, who himself cast a firebrand to the windward among the light mats of their cabins. The helpless natives climbed the palisades as their blazing encampment assisted the English marksmen in taking good aim. Six hundred Indians, men, women and children, perished, most of them in the hideous conflagration. Capt. Miles Standish had twenty years earlier slaughtered Witawamo and others of the Massachusetts tribe, the knowledge of which, as it reached the gentle spirited Robinson in Leyden, caused the pastor to write to Bradford, “concerning the killing of those poor Indians, of which we heard at first by report and since by more certain relation. Oh, how happy a thing had it been if you had converted some before you killed any.”
“The principle and foundation of the charter of Massachusetts,” wrote Charles II. at a time when he had Clarendon for his adviser, “was the freedom of liberty and conscience, not only for the Puritan but for the natives, whom the ministers might win to the Christian faith.” The instructions to Endicott as to the rights of the Indians on the far-away Atlantic coast, and their duty to them, were clear and emphatic. “If any of the savages pretend right of inheritance to all or any part of the lands granted in our patent, endeavor to purchase their title, that we may avoid the least scruple of intrusion. Particularly publish that no wrong or injury be offered to the natives.” The colony seal was a wandering Indian with arrows in his right hand, with the motto, “Come and help me.” For more than two hundred and fifty years, from our Indian tribes, as they have been steadily driven before the surging tide of civilization from the Atlantic to the Pacific, has there been the constant cry of the weaker to the stronger forces of the continent, “come and help me.” Many who will be in attendance upon your Annual Meeting have seen “Standing Bear” of the Poncas, who was wantonly and wickedly driven from his home on the banks of the Missouri by the Government, and heard him tell his simple story of wrong endured, and heard his appeal, “Come and help me.” With sublime faith that God intended all men to be free and equal, all men without restriction, without qualification, without limit, let us listen to their appeal, and respond with the best help in our power to contribute.
Never before in the history of this country has there been such an awakening in behalf of the Indian. Never before such healthy sentiment for justice and fair play for the original owners of the soil over which our fifty millions of prosperous people unfurl the flag of the free. The Indian question, like the Ghost of Banquo, is at every banquet. It will not down until “Birnam wood do come to Dunsinane.” Hundreds of years of broken faith, during which ambuscades, massacres, fired Indian camps, blazing wigwams and smouldering embers of burned villages, have strewn the pathway of our march of empire, until now upon every lip is the interrogatory, What shall be done with the Indian? All the Indian asks, all his friends ask for him, is a fair chance.