Napoleon (a Catholic chief of the Tulalip reservation, who “came forward with much dignity and laid before Mr. Brunot a bunch of split sticks”): These represent the number of my people killed by the whites during the year, and yet nothing has been done to punish them. The whites now scare all the Indians, and we look now wondering when all the Indians will be killed.
Johnny English: We like Father Chirouse very well, because he tries to do what is right; when he begins to work he does one thing at a time.
Henry (a Catholic on the Lumni reservation): I have been a Christian for many years. We have some children at school with Father Chirouse; we want our lands for them to live on when we are dead.
David Crockett (a Catholic chief): I ought to have a better house in which to receive my friends. But we want most an altar built in our church and a belfry on it; this work we cannot do ourselves.
Spar (a young chief): All the agents think of is to steal; that is all every agent has done. When they get the money, where does it go to? When I ask about it they say they will punish me. I thought the President did not send them for that.
Peter Connoyer (of the Grande Rondes): About religion—I am a Catholic; so are all of my family. All the children are Catholics. We want the sisters to come and teach the girls. The priest lives here; he does not get any pay. He teaches us to pray night and morning. We must teach the little girls. I am getting old. I may go to a race and bet a little, but I don’t want my children to learn it; it is bad.
Tom Curl: We want to get good blankets, not paper blankets. I don’t know what our boots are made of; if we hit anything they break in pieces.
When, in 1870, President Grant announced the inauguration of his new Indian policy, the sects saw in it an opportunity of carrying on their propaganda among the Indians with little or no cost to themselves, and of interfering with, and probably compelling the total cessation of, the work of the Catholic Church among many of the tribes. To begin with, here were 72 places in which they could install the same number of their ministers, or laymen devoted to their interests, with salaries paid by the general government. Once installed as Indian agents, these men would have autocratic power over the affairs of the tribes entrusted to them; and they could make life so uncomfortable for the Catholic missionaries already at work there that they would probably retire. If they disregarded petty persecutions, the agent could compel them to depart, since it is held by the Indian Bureau that an agent has power to exclude from a reservation any white man whose presence he chooses to consider as inconvenient, as well as to prevent the Indians from leaving the reservation for any purpose whatever. There were, it was known, many Indian agencies at which the Catholic Church had had missions for many years, and where all, or nearly all, the Indians were Catholics. If these agencies could be assigned to the care of the sects, how easily could the work of converting the Indian Catholics into Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Quakers, or Unitarians be accomplished! The priests could be driven away and forbidden to return; the sectarian preachers would have full play; and the Indian appetite for Protestant truth could be sharpened by judicious bribery and intimidation. On the borders of the reservation there might be—as there are—Catholic churches and Catholic priests; but the Catholic Indians on the reservation might be—as they have been—forbidden to cross the line in order to visit their priests and to receive the sacraments.
The new Indian policy which furnished this opportunity was probably not original with President Grant, and we are not disposed to call in question the purity and kindness of his motives in adopting it. At the time of its inauguration, however, he was surrounded by influences decidedly hostile to the Catholic Church; and it is probable that from the beginning the men “behind the throne” had a clear conception of the manner in which the new policy could be worked for the benefit of the sects. It was based upon an idea plausible to non-Catholics, but which no Catholic can ever accept—the idea that one religion is as good as another, and that, for example, it does not make much difference whether a man believes that Jesus Christ is God, or that he was simply a tolerably good but rather weak and vain man. This idea has been carried out in practice-for even to the “Unitarians” have been given two Indian agencies: those of the Los Pinos and White River in Colorado, whose entire religious education for 1876, as reported by the agents, consisted in “a sort of Shaker service of singing and dancing held for two or three days.” The chairman of the Board of Indian Commissioners, Mr. Brunot, appears to have been anxious to spread abroad the doctrine of indifferentism among the Catholic Indians. Whenever, in his numerous “councils,” he found himself in company with such Indians, he undertook to enlighten them after this fashion:
“A chief said yesterday: ‘I don’t know about religion, because they tell so many different things.’ Religion is like the roads; they all go one way; all to the one good place; so take any one good road and keep in it, and it will bring you out right at last.” ... “I heard an Indian say that the white man has two religions. In one way it looks so; but if you will understand you will see it is only one.” ... “It is not two kinds of religion, but it is as two roads that both go the same way.”