The Indians are grown-up children; we are a thousand years ahead of them in the line of development. Progress is measured by development. Education is not progress but is a means of it. A brain full of book knowledge, whose physical basis is the product of centuries of barbarism, is an absurdity that we do not half realize, from our excessive traditional reverence for school and college training. We forget that knowledge is not power unless it is digested and assimilated. Savages have good memories; they acquire but do not comprehend.
Indians are easily taught, for their minds are quick; their bodies are a greater care than their brains; but morals are the chief concern of their teachers. Hence their education should be first for the heart, then for health, and last for the mind, reversing the custom of placing mind before physique and character. This is the Hampton idea of education.
Apply sanctified common sense to the Indian problem and you will save them in spite of the steam engine and the threats of fate.
The Indian question has been put wrong end first. It points to us, not to them.
The possibilities of sound educational methods are not dreamed of. The power of mind over matter is everywhere seen, but the power of mind over mind, of man over man, is little shown in all our proud progress. That three years’ work of Captain Pratt at Fort Marion, Florida, is the best illustration of it I know of. Yet he never had over two years’ schooling, and went from his workshop to the war. Work for the ex-captives was so encouraging, the need of educated Indian girls so obvious, that resolving to push our effort further, Mr. Schurz was interviewed, entered heartily into the scheme, and sent Capt. Pratt to Dakota Territory, whence he brought to Hampton in Nov., 1878, forty boys and nine girls, since increased to twenty-two girls and forty-eight boys. Indian girls lead a slavish life, do all the drudgery, and parents have hated to spare them. Boys do nothing till they can fight. “I would send a hundred boys, but not one girl,” said a chief to Capt. Pratt. But now one agency alone, Yankton, would fill our school with Sioux girls. Agent Miles says he could enroll Cheyenne children from the Indian Territory for eastern schools as fast as he could write their names.
Co-education of the sexes will succeed with Indians as well as with colored people in the six largest institutions for negroes, in which for ten years it has been tried with the best results.
The death rate at Hampton has been serious but not discouraging. Out of ninety-six, in twenty-two months seven have died at school and three since returning home. The tribe, gathered as they are in unnatural conditions at the agencies, away from the chase and the fight, without action or buffalo beef, fed on government rations, weaken.
Indian students have in almost all cases died of diseases implanted before leaving home; their friends have not been surprised or discouraged.
Chief Wizi, on hearing of the death of his adopted son at Hampton, called his tribe together and said: “If only one of our children returns to us with knowledge, we shall be repaid for the loss of all the others.”
While this eastern work at Carlisle and Hampton is incidental to the general educational effort which must be made at the West, it is, more than anything else, pushing the Indian question to a proper settlement by creating public sentiment. For a Congressman to see an Indian hoeing corn, does more good than piles of documentary evidence. The hundreds of clear-headed, hard-handed young red-skins who will, ere long, be settled among the tribes, will, we think, be strong enough to sustain each other and to teach the rest. They will not return home scared by our great guns and arsenals, but stimulated by contact with the spirit that lies at the bottom of our progress. They must see civilization to comprehend it.