Why not take these twenty Indian children that the Indian department are ready to give you? This would be safe; then feel your way along. Let them study mornings and work afternoons, and play Saturdays. We do so. The labor is one of some delicacy and difficulty. But the Indian is like everybody else. That’s our experience. Treat him firmly, fairly, kindly; give him no second-rate teacher; he is keen and appreciative.
Why not go ahead? The Government will place them at your doors free of expense, and give you $150 a year for twelve months’ schooling and care—which will barely pay for their food and clothing. That’s all we can get. The people must pay in part the cost of such education to get it done. We try to obtain a yearly seventy-dollar scholarship for each one and have been fairly successful. You can get these by working for them. You say, “We have no room for them; where is the money with which to erect buildings?”
We hope next fall to have thirty more Indian girls, making fifty boys and fifty girls, and are now trying to raise twenty thousand dollars to put up next summer a suitable building for the girls, that shall have every appliance for practical education, including cooking, sewing, clothes-making, washing and ironing, and housework generally, furnishing room for seventy.
We have no idea where the money is to come from. We have faith that it will come, because such work is in the line of God’s providential movement. He who wisely works in that line cannot fail. The way to get it is to ask for it, prepare for it, push for it, be worthy of it, pray for it, and it will come. The people of the country will sustain a good work for Indians.
Some may object that it will trespass upon the negro. Has it been so here? How would our colored students feel to-day if our Indians were to be withdrawn? They would vote solidly against it; they would lose and not gain, and they know it. Is the mutual love and respect of these races of no account?
The American Missionary Association aims to destroy caste. This is our way to do it. Nothing here has ever filled me with more pleasure than watching our students’ recreations, in which race lines are utterly forgotten. They exist between them, and many feared, in consequence, disastrous results of their mingling. Two of our most important and successful Indian teachers are negroes, graduates of this school.
Three seventy-dollar scholarships are contributed by Virginia churches for this Indian work, from Petersburg, Portsmouth, and Hampton, respectively. Southern churches are aiding negro schools.
Have faith and go in for Indians!