THE INDIANS.

REPORT OF THE COMMITTEE.

The Committee on Indian Missions would report:

First. That the work of this Association among the Indians—a work so small that the expenditure for it is only about one-fifth that for the Chinese in America—has been prospered during the last year. The blessing of the Master rests upon it, and our thanksgiving and prayers should be stimulated thereby.

Second. We heartily approve of its plan to combine an industrial with a literary education, that the boys and girls may take the lead in Christian arts as in Christian culture. Yet the experiment of training them in schools far from home should be carefully watched, lest there be formed a gulf of separation between the tribe and its educated youth, a gulf so deep that those returning from Hampton shall, through social longings, lapse into the customs of their fathers, or else shall stand aloof from their people in cultured isolation. We should subordinate individual advancement to tribal advantage; the benefit of the few to that of the many; and for this purpose schools are being established nearer home. Hence we recommend the careful study of the results of the experiment.

Third. We would earnestly press the evangelistic work among the Indians. They are to stay with us. They are soon to be of us, citizens with us of this Republic. So much is written in the providence of God. To educate them is not enough. The federal government is increasingly engaged in this. But its Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the Hon. H. Price, in his forthcoming report says: “Civilization is a plant of exceeding slow growth unless supplemented by Christian teaching and influence.” “In no other manner and by no other means, in my judgment, can our Indian population be so speedily and permanently reclaimed from barbarism, idolatry, and savage life as by the educational and missionary operations of the Christian people of our country.” Christianized education is the watchword, the vitalizing of all the truth of God with the love and spirit of God. This means more than schools; it means Christian schools and Christian churches. For this very work this Association has been ordained of God, and it should enlarge its work to the demands of the hour. The proposed exchange with the American Board means, for this society, enlargement. The rapid progress of the Indian towards citizenship demands enlargement. God calls this Association to enlarge its Indian missions that it may prepare both the negro and the Indian for citizenship and God.

Fourth. We believe that the welfare of the Indian demands the abolition of both tribal and reservation relations, the allotment of their lands in severalty, their amenability to State and federal laws and courts. And while we recognize with gratitude the past attempts of our national government in these directions, we need to press upon Congress the duty of renewing its endeavors and enlarging its appropriations for schools, that it may speedily turn these wards into industrious citizens. And for this end we would recommend that a committee of nine be appointed by this Association to memorialize Congress to place the Indian by the side of the negro and other citizens in the right to buy, own, and sell property, real and personal, to work at what he pleases, and live where he pleases, to have the same standing before the law, to vote and hold office, in short to possess all the rights and obligations of citizens of the Republic.

A. H. Ross, Chairman.

WORK AND DUTY IN THE EAST.

BY GEN. S. C. ARMSTRONG.

At Hampton there are ninety, and at Carlisle there are nearly three hundred Indians—boys and girls—who are learning civilization as an object lesson, and are themselves an object lesson to the centres of intelligence and wealth, where is the sentiment that inspires and the means that provide for the combined practical and spiritual teaching of the red man. They suffice, perhaps, for a tangible proof of the Indian’s capacity, of which the need was great; their effect upon public sentiment has been marked. The result with these Indians has, so far, proved satisfactory. Scattering these pupils among the farmers of Massachusetts and of Pennsylvania for a portion of the year, has had such a good effect mutually, that five hundred more might well be so placed in various States, under the care of special agents, with proper rendezvous where the sick or unsatisfactory might be kept with a view to returning home, say ten per cent, of the entire number.

The Negro institutions at Nashville, Tenn., at Talladega, Alabama, and elsewhere, could do excellent work for them. The aims and methods of most white schools render them unfit for Indians.

We have found the weak point of the race to be physical, not mental or moral. They can endure the hardships peculiar to the plains, but not steady work from day to day. They are tainted with inherited disease; the lungs are their weak point. They are sinewy but not muscular; however, as a race they hold their own with favorable surroundings, are not decreasing seriously, if at all, and will not settle the problem by dying out.

Mechanically they have proved apt to learn, but slow to execute. Our Hampton Indian work-shops have this year supplied the Indian Department with two thousand pairs of men’s brogan shoes, five hundred dozen articles of tinware, and seventy-five sets of double plow harness, which were pronounced by the inspectors well-made and satisfactory. Carlisle has done more.

Both girls and boys take quickly and kindly to neatness and to industrial pursuits, as well as to books. They are as eager as the Negroes for knowledge, and become more and more so as they advance. Want of ambition is the least of their troubles. Teaching them is hard work, but interesting and stimulating in the highest degree.

They resent injury, but are not revengeful; not a sign of treachery in nearly five years. Religiously, they are, I believe, the most hopeful of the heathen races. The vastness and the grandeur of the West has affected them as desert life has the Arabs; they are remarkably Oriental in customs and ideas. They worship no fetish, there are no idols to break, but they have a crude faith to be cleared, dim eyes to be opened.

Christian efforts, under the care of Archdeacon Kirby of the Episcopal Church, have evangelized ten thousand Indians of British America, in their simple natural life. The mixed, harassed condition of our own, makes the work far more difficult.

The mingling of races at Hampton has worked well; they are mutually helpful and stimulating. An Indian classmate is kindly, thoughtfully treated by his colored compeers. A race that has been led is leading another. The “House-Father,” chief of our sixty Sioux boys, is a negro. With perhaps finer mental and moral texture, the red race does not produce half enough to feed itself; the rougher, stronger blacks have not thrown a pauper upon the country, and raise raw material for the mills of Christendom. With benevolent intentions we have diminished and weakened the one; using the other only for selfish purposes, it has multiplied and grown stronger. Bringing both races under the care of the American Missionary Association is most fitting and wise. Both are peculiarly the concern of the American people, are providentially committed to our care, and are a part of us. In doing for them we are doing for ourselves, our children, and our country.

On the Indian girl rests most heavily the weight of past and present influences. When, in October, 1881, I took 25 Indian boys and five girls back to their Dakota homes, after three years’ training at Hampton, the former were readily placed in rooms by themselves, away from the camp, employed in agency work-shops at the trades they had learned, and thus helped on greatly. The girls could not be so isolated; they had no trades, and though they could make their own garments and do housework, there were not suitable situations for them; they returned to their mothers and grandmothers, who might sell them to the brave who would pay the highest price in ponies for them.

One of the five, an earnest Christian, wrote: “Hard to be good woman out here.” She finally married a white man of good repute. Another is reported as a most satisfactory house servant in the family of a missionary; another keeps her father’s store and books. He is one of the best and most thrifty of Indians; but the family live in one room in a log house. Two others, younger, are waiting an opportunity to return to Hampton for two years’ more training, with a view to becoming teachers.

Teaching is the career for Indian girls, as it has been the one way for colored girls of the South to be more than drudges; there it is the only field for a womanly ambition. The increase of educational work for Indians creates some hope for their girls, on whom rests the future of their race.

There is a tendency to increase our Indians’ course of study to longer than three years. One set having returned, the Indians, whose parental feelings are tender and strong, are more trustful of us, and readily consent to a longer absence of their children. One boy has already returned at his own expense, and another is saving his money for the purpose, both to learn more and to perfect themselves in their trade of shoemaking. The sooner the Indian can stand without government aid, the better. Any boy can return who will pay his way back. This gives a motive to work, and creates appreciation of his opportunities.

For the practical necessities of Indian life their training should be practical.

We give half the day to study and half to labor. An education which does not fit them to take care of themselves may do them more harm than good.

I think that when charity and the government are linked together for Indian work, the former should erect the buildings and maintain the teachers, the latter supply the wants of the body. United States beef and flour and shoes are as good as any body’s, but government employés, as our civil service stands, are not the men to elevate the Indian. The telling factor in all work for men is the person who does it. Unless that shall be supplied from the pure fountains of our Christian civilization it will not, as a rule, be supplied at all. I refer to the educational work at the agencies; there the government day and boarding schools should be strictly responsible to the controlling power, and their moral value will be that of the agent in charge. Missionary institutions should stimulate these, and should be conducted by superior men and women directly responsible to their Eastern supporters. I call it sham missionary work to send out Christian teachers to be supported on public pay. The churches who do that, and some do, are doing nothing. Let us first send our own teachers for the Indians, and then fit them to become their own teachers; to make the teachers is to make the people.

The free Negro schools in the South are vitalized by a number of strong central institutions under Northern men that train the picked growth of the race as teachers. This is, I think, the true relation of Eastern charity to the Indian. There should be an excellent boarding and industrial school at each important agency for this purpose. Getting fifteen dollars a month of government for food and clothing for each pupil need not in the least weaken the independence or morals of teachers. The friends of the Indian will do the rest.

The situation is critical, the opportunity is great; the rising tide of public sentiment, the movement at Washington, the eagerness as well as the exigency of the red man mean much.

But this work needs a leader; it will drag if thrown on an overloaded man. The man is as much as the money; the one will bring the other, both by wise appeals and good work that will commend itself to the country.

For more than a century Indians rejected our civilization; now their thinking men, for they are a race of thinkers, forecast the future and wish their children taught the white man’s way as their only hope.

They do not choose this; they are compelled to it. Hundreds, thousands, are waiting for an education. They beg for what they once refused.