OUR NEW INDIAN POLICY AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY.
“While it cannot be denied that the government of the United States, in the general terms and temper of its legislation, has evinced a desire to deal generously with the Indians, it must be admitted that the actual treatment they have received has been unjust and iniquitous beyond the power of words to express. Taught by the government that they had rights entitled to respect, when these rights have been assailed by the rapacity of the white man the arm which should have been raised to protect them has been ever ready to sustain the aggressor. The history of the government connections with the Indians is a shameful record of broken treaties and unfulfilled promises.”
We take the above sentences from the first report of the Board of Indian Commissioners appointed by President Grant under the act of Congress of April 10, 1869. The commissioners, nine in number, were gentlemen selected for their presumed piety, philanthropy, and practical business qualities. None of them was a Catholic; in taking their testimony not only with respect to the general treatment of the Indians, but in regard to the religious interests of some of the tribes, we shall not be suspected of summoning witnesses who are prejudiced in favor of the Catholic Church. One of the commissioners, indeed, Mr. Felix R. Brunot, of Pittsburgh, the chairman of the board, appears to have been inspired at times with a lively fear and hatred of the church; his colleagues—Messrs. Robert Campbell, of St. Louis; Nathan Bishop, of New York; William E. Dodge, of New York; John V. Farwell, of Chicago; George H. Stuart, of Philadelphia; Edward S. Tobey, of Boston; John D. Lang, of Maine; and Vincent Colyer, of New York—are gentlemen quite free from any predilection in favor of Catholicity. The passage we have taken from their first report relates only to the worldly affairs of the Indians. But a perusal of the various annual reports of this board, of the Commissioners of Indian Affairs, and of the Indian agents, from 1869 until 1876, has convinced us that the injuries inflicted upon the Indians have been by no means confined to those caused by the avarice and rapacity of the whites. Sectarian fanaticism, Protestant bigotry, and anti-Christian hatred have been called into play, and the arm of the government has been made the instrument for the restriction, and even the abolition, of religious freedom among many of the Indian tribes.
We are confident that such treatment is not in consonance with the wishes of the American people. Have we not been taught, from our youth up, that the two chief glories of our country were the equality of all its citizens before the law and their absolute freedom in all religious matters? True, the Indians are not citizens, but we have undertaken the task of acting as their guardians, with the hope of ultimately fitting them, or as many of them as may be tough enough to endure the process, for the duties of citizenship. To begin this task by teaching our pupils that religion is not a matter of conscience—that the government has a right to force upon a people a form of Christianity against which their consciences revolt—and to punish them for attempting to adhere to the church whose priests first taught them to know and to fear God, is not merely a moral wrong; it is a crime.
The whole number of Indians in the United States and Territories, according to the very careful and systematic census contained in the report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs for 1875, was 279,333, exclusive of those in Alaska. It is not a very large number; the population of the city of New York exceeds it nearly fourfold. The Indian Bureau classifies these people under four heads:
I. 98,108 Indians who “are wild and scarcely tractable to any extent beyond that of coming near enough to the government agent to receive rations and blankets.”
II. 52,113 Indians “who are thoroughly convinced of the necessity of labor, and are actually undertaking it, and with more or less readiness accept the direction and assistance of government agents to this end.”
III. 115,385 Indians “who have come into possession of allotted lands and other property in stock and implements belonging to a landed estate.”
IV. 13,727 Indians who are described as “roamers and vagrants,” and of whom the commissioner, the Hon. Edward P. Smith, speaks in the following Christian and statesman-like language:
“They are generally as harmless as vagrants and vagabonds can be in a civilized country. They are found in all stages of degradation produced by licentiousness, intemperance, idleness, and poverty. Without land, unwilling to leave their haunts for a homestead upon a reservation, and scarcely in any way related to, or recognized by, the government, they drag out a miserable life. Themselves corrupted and the source of corruption, they seem to serve by their continued existence but a single useful purpose—that of affording a living illustration of the tendency and effect of barbarism allowed to expand itself uncured,”