The Negro institutions at Nashville, Tenn., at Talladega, Alabama, and elsewhere, could do excellent work for them. The aims and methods of most white schools render them unfit for Indians.
We have found the weak point of the race to be physical, not mental or moral. They can endure the hardships peculiar to the plains, but not steady work from day to day. They are tainted with inherited disease; the lungs are their weak point. They are sinewy but not muscular; however, as a race they hold their own with favorable surroundings, are not decreasing seriously, if at all, and will not settle the problem by dying out.
Mechanically they have proved apt to learn, but slow to execute. Our Hampton Indian work-shops have this year supplied the Indian Department with two thousand pairs of men’s brogan shoes, five hundred dozen articles of tinware, and seventy-five sets of double plow harness, which were pronounced by the inspectors well-made and satisfactory. Carlisle has done more.
Both girls and boys take quickly and kindly to neatness and to industrial pursuits, as well as to books. They are as eager as the Negroes for knowledge, and become more and more so as they advance. Want of ambition is the least of their troubles. Teaching them is hard work, but interesting and stimulating in the highest degree.
They resent injury, but are not revengeful; not a sign of treachery in nearly five years. Religiously, they are, I believe, the most hopeful of the heathen races. The vastness and the grandeur of the West has affected them as desert life has the Arabs; they are remarkably Oriental in customs and ideas. They worship no fetish, there are no idols to break, but they have a crude faith to be cleared, dim eyes to be opened.
Christian efforts, under the care of Archdeacon Kirby of the Episcopal Church, have evangelized ten thousand Indians of British America, in their simple natural life. The mixed, harassed condition of our own, makes the work far more difficult.
The mingling of races at Hampton has worked well; they are mutually helpful and stimulating. An Indian classmate is kindly, thoughtfully treated by his colored compeers. A race that has been led is leading another. The “House-Father,” chief of our sixty Sioux boys, is a negro. With perhaps finer mental and moral texture, the red race does not produce half enough to feed itself; the rougher, stronger blacks have not thrown a pauper upon the country, and raise raw material for the mills of Christendom. With benevolent intentions we have diminished and weakened the one; using the other only for selfish purposes, it has multiplied and grown stronger. Bringing both races under the care of the American Missionary Association is most fitting and wise. Both are peculiarly the concern of the American people, are providentially committed to our care, and are a part of us. In doing for them we are doing for ourselves, our children, and our country.
On the Indian girl rests most heavily the weight of past and present influences. When, in October, 1881, I took 25 Indian boys and five girls back to their Dakota homes, after three years’ training at Hampton, the former were readily placed in rooms by themselves, away from the camp, employed in agency work-shops at the trades they had learned, and thus helped on greatly. The girls could not be so isolated; they had no trades, and though they could make their own garments and do housework, there were not suitable situations for them; they returned to their mothers and grandmothers, who might sell them to the brave who would pay the highest price in ponies for them.
One of the five, an earnest Christian, wrote: “Hard to be good woman out here.” She finally married a white man of good repute. Another is reported as a most satisfactory house servant in the family of a missionary; another keeps her father’s store and books. He is one of the best and most thrifty of Indians; but the family live in one room in a log house. Two others, younger, are waiting an opportunity to return to Hampton for two years’ more training, with a view to becoming teachers.
Teaching is the career for Indian girls, as it has been the one way for colored girls of the South to be more than drudges; there it is the only field for a womanly ambition. The increase of educational work for Indians creates some hope for their girls, on whom rests the future of their race.