While giving great attention to industrial training, it affords unparalleled advantages for that training which is needed to make teachers suited to Indian schools.
The school is the basis of evangelizing the Indian. There will be no large audiences to preach to, except on exceptional occasions, until the school has gathered a company of disciples. Certain persons not understanding the nature of missionary work, or unable to take more than a superficial view, have recently represented our schools as of low grade, and unnecessary to real missionary work. But this is contradicted by the grand progress of the work.
We have spoken of five mission stations as now passing under the care of the A. M. A. But of these Standing Rock is hardly opened, and Berthold and Sully stations are sadly in need of reinforcements. And there are the large Indian Agencies of Spotted Tail’s and Red Cloud’s tribes, numbering about 7,000 each, which we ought to occupy. Then there is the Crow country in Montana, next door to our Berthold Mission. We should have at once six ordained missionaries and their wives, with as many more assistant missionaries, all picked men. This would enable us to manage a yet larger number of native missionary teachers working along with them.
[Illustration: SISSETON GIRLS, WITH TEACHER.]
The tribes speaking the Dakota language are the most numerous of any Indian people upon the continent. They are now universally open to Christianity and Christian civilization. They now look to Christian people for their future. Within the last ten or twelve years the whole temper of their mind has changed. The noted chief, Sitting Bull, is an illustration. Only a few years ago he hated the very wind that blew from the direction of the white man’s country. When the wind blew from the east he would send out the town crier to say, “Get you all into your teepees. This is bad air from the white man’s country.” But when it blew from the north his crier would proclaim, “Come out and breathe the healthy air.” And once when a woman of the tribe brought home a “rooster” from a distant trading post to enliven the tedium of her labor, Sitting Bull heard it crow and instantly dispatched his chief soldier to “soldier kill” the woman, that is, cut up her tent and kill her horses, for the crime of having that white man’s bird in the sacred precincts of a Dakota camp. But now the same Sitting Bull is petitioning for Christian teachers, and land, and domestic animals, and undoubtedly would also welcome “the-bird-that-crows-in-the-morning.”