Congress will appropriate hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed Indians, millions to fight them, but will not give the nominal additional sum necessary to induce men who can make a living in any other way to become Indian agents. We tell the Indians to take the white man’s road and refuse to open it. He needs ideas; he is capable of citizenship, but is unfit to hold lands or manage property till he can read and write, and knows something of our language.
Of the forty thousand wild children of the plains who are looking to the nation for education, not over eight thousand are enrolled at school. The average is far less. We are rich and paying all our debts but those to the illiterate of the land, whose ignorance is not their fault. The little children will one day lead. Honor and interest demand a care for their welfare. The point of sending children to Carlisle and Hampton should not be that they may learn trades so much as to acquire our language and habits, and see and comprehend civilization—a temporary sojourn away from their people, that all interested in them declare to be most desirable. Settling Indians on homesteads, encouraging mechanic arts, agriculture, and especially cattle-raising, for which this race is peculiarly adapted, and has, at the beginning, in its fitness for it, an advantage over white men, turns more than anything else on the wisdom, skill and perseverance of the agent.
It should be said that there has been for the past ten years a steady improvement in the morals of the agencies, the ideas and habits of Indians, and in the character and efficiency of Government employees. The chief who once said, “We can’t eat schools and teachers, and don’t want them,” and afterward sent his son to Hampton, illustrates the change in Indian thought that is steadily going on. Progressive Indians have suffered persecutions. To abandon the dance, put away wild costumes, and rub the paint off his face, has cost many an Indian suffering and loss. The “white man way” is not even more fashionable or comfortable, ridicule being one penalty, which, to an Indian is hard to bear.
The quiet missionary work done for the red race during the past forty years is the seed sowing, of which it and the nation will reap a harvest of good results. The Indian is a worshiper; “the blue sky and high bluffs are their church edifice, the medicine man being their minister.” With selfishness and vindictiveness running through their religion, it contains a recognition of one God, a Spirit which may be readily expounded by Christian teaching into an adequate conception of the true God. No heathen in the world offer so little to obstruct and so much to encourage the work of the missionary. Four years’ experience at Hampton has shown them to be remarkably open to truth, and not to be in any marked degree revengeful. They are like other people, their special weakness being physical. Christians of America have a duty to the Indian that they have not done. Their work in the West should be doubled at once. United effort by the great religious societies would do much for the welfare of this race, through persistent pressure upon Congress for a proper legal status.