First-class men, and no others, can settle the Indian question. The want of them is the bottom fact in our Indian troubles. Government pays the market price for good beef and sugar and tobacco, but will not pay for good men. There is only one answer to the question, “Can a superior man afford to be an Indian agent?” No! There are excellent Indian agents, thanks to their noble impulses, but Government should buy and not beg what it is bound to get. Salaries are from $900 to $2,200, depending principally upon the number of Indians under the agent’s care. Hence, the more liberally he feeds, the more the roving bands of the plains seek his care and swell his income. Pressing self-support upon them may scatter them and lessen his salary.
Congress will appropriate hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed Indians, millions to fight them, but will not give the nominal additional sum necessary to induce men who can make a living in any other way to become Indian agents. We tell the Indians to take the white man’s road and refuse to open it. He needs ideas; he is capable of citizenship, but is unfit to hold lands or manage property till he can read and write, and knows something of our language.
Of the forty thousand wild children of the plains who are looking to the nation for education, not over eight thousand are enrolled at school. The average is far less. We are rich and paying all our debts but those to the illiterate of the land, whose ignorance is not their fault. The little children will one day lead. Honor and interest demand a care for their welfare. The point of sending children to Carlisle and Hampton should not be that they may learn trades so much as to acquire our language and habits, and see and comprehend civilization—a temporary sojourn away from their people, that all interested in them declare to be most desirable. Settling Indians on homesteads, encouraging mechanic arts, agriculture, and especially cattle-raising, for which this race is peculiarly adapted, and has, at the beginning, in its fitness for it, an advantage over white men, turns more than anything else on the wisdom, skill and perseverance of the agent.
It should be said that there has been for the past ten years a steady improvement in the morals of the agencies, the ideas and habits of Indians, and in the character and efficiency of Government employees. The chief who once said, “We can’t eat schools and teachers, and don’t want them,” and afterward sent his son to Hampton, illustrates the change in Indian thought that is steadily going on. Progressive Indians have suffered persecutions. To abandon the dance, put away wild costumes, and rub the paint off his face, has cost many an Indian suffering and loss. The “white man way” is not even more fashionable or comfortable, ridicule being one penalty, which, to an Indian is hard to bear.
The quiet missionary work done for the red race during the past forty years is the seed sowing, of which it and the nation will reap a harvest of good results. The Indian is a worshiper; “the blue sky and high bluffs are their church edifice, the medicine man being their minister.” With selfishness and vindictiveness running through their religion, it contains a recognition of one God, a Spirit which may be readily expounded by Christian teaching into an adequate conception of the true God. No heathen in the world offer so little to obstruct and so much to encourage the work of the missionary. Four years’ experience at Hampton has shown them to be remarkably open to truth, and not to be in any marked degree revengeful. They are like other people, their special weakness being physical. Christians of America have a duty to the Indian that they have not done. Their work in the West should be doubled at once. United effort by the great religious societies would do much for the welfare of this race, through persistent pressure upon Congress for a proper legal status.
In citizenship is the salvation of the Indian; wardship tends to emasculate him. The effect of the ballot would be to make a man of him as it did of the negro. To be brought out of his present condition into fitness to vote is a work of the utmost delicacy and difficulty, but it can be done. They are not dying out—at any rate, the 50,000 Sioux are not. Twenty-eight Sioux Indian youth, who had spent three years at Hampton, have just been returned to their Dakota home. Of these young men six are farmers and assist in general work, getting from fifteen to twenty dollars per month; two are employed in offices at the same wages; six are teachers, getting twenty dollars a month; two are blacksmiths, two are shoemakers, and seven are carpenters, getting a dollar a day apiece; all have rations besides. All refused to go to camp life, and have been provided by the Government agents with separate buildings, which they have cleaned and fitted up as best they could. The Indian Department has seconded their efforts very heartily. The next twelve months will decide their success. Their course will be watched with interest, as a test of the methods at Carlisle and Hampton schools, and indeed of the Indian’s ability to make good use of our education.
The “General Survey” for the year suggests suitable accommodations for Indians in some other of our institutions. This would be wise. The 370 negro youth at Hampton are a wonderful help to their 90 Indian schoolmates both directly and indirectly. The mingling of the races has proved a success, reacting happily on both. Increase the good work of your institutions and they will grow in favor with God and man.
FROM ADDRESS OF CAPT. R. H. PRATT.
Last summer, at Carlisle, during the vacation period, we put out in good families among the farmers, 109 of our children. They all came back (except 29 who are to stay during the winter) immensely advantaged by it, speaking better English, with the Indian diffidence rooted out to a degree that it would have been impossible for us to have accomplished in the same time even at Carlisle, which, from its advantages of contact with civilization, is immensely superior to any agency school. But we went farther. We found that the boys and girls had made such good impressions among the citizens that many desired them to stay, and so the Department was asked to allow a few to remain out for the winter, and go to the public schools with the white children and live in families. The Department gave its consent provided it would cost nothing. So arrangements were made, and we have out for this winter six girls and twenty-three boys.