So closed this interesting missionary meeting among the red Dakota people. In the afternoon, after a lunch, the parents took their children home for the vacation, but there were no Saratoga trunks to pack or carry.
All of this, let it be remembered, was in the Dakota language—which is now forbidden—the only language which they can use, or in which the gospel can be made known to them.
A. F. BEARD
The following incident, taken from a letter received at this office from Miss Collins, is at least an intimation of how heartlessly cruel is the proposition to deny the Indians the use of their own language in their schools:
“One of our Santee school boys is dying. He is a true child of God. He wishes to see his relatives all saved, and O! the light in his face. It is grand as he reads in his own tongue to the old men and women and the young people the sweet words, ‘Let not your heart be troubled.’ He has plead with them to turn to Christ to be saved. He says: ‘I am not afraid to die.’”
CANADIAN INDIANS.
Rev. Silas Huntington, a missionary of the Montreal Methodist Conference, has been laboring along the line of the Canadian Pacific Railroad. In his report recently made, Mr. Huntington gives an incident illustrative in a striking manner of the power of the gospel over the pagan heart. He says:
“The Hudson Bay Company has an important post established on the line of this road in connection with which I have found a band of Indians, numbering seventy-two souls, who were converted from paganism at Michipicoton over twenty years ago under the labors of the late Rev. Geo. McDougall. They claim to be Methodists, and through all these years, although separated from the body of their tribe, they have kept their faith and maintained their religious worship without the aid of a missionary.