THE VERNACULAR IN INDIAN SCHOOLS.
BY SECRETARY STRIKEY.
This question is not settled. One thing that has kept it unsettled has been the uncertain use of the term "missionary schools" in the Orders of the Indian Department. What is precisely a missionary school? Let me try to explain. There are three kinds of schools in the nomenclature of the Indian Office, based on the sources of their support.
1. Government Schools, supported wholly by Government appropriations—such as those at Carlisle, Genoa, etc. These may be left out of the account in this discussion, for no one objects to the Government's directing the studies in them.
2. Contract Schools, so called because the missionary societies which sustain them receive under contract with the Government a certain amount of money in aid of their support. The school at Santee, Nebraska, and the school at Yankton, Dakota, are specimens of this class. But these are mission schools, for the societies which support them would not continue to do so for a day except for their missionary character; and yet these schools are classed by the Department not as missionary but as contract schools.
3. Missionary Schools, which are supported wholly by missionary funds, the Government contributing nothing. Here, again, in the recent order, the Department employs the confusing use of terms, speaking in general terms of "missionary schools," and then of missionary schools under the charge of "native Indian teachers," and at remote points; the inference being that the white teacher of a missionary school, though it may be in a place so remote that neither the pupils nor the people can understand the English language, cannot teach in the vernacular.
With these explanations we present, under date of Feb. 11, 1888,