Note 211 — XV. CARE OF THE INDIAN.

This said:

To the President of the United States, and to the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress Assembled:

We, the undersigned men and women of these United States, do most respectfully but most earnestly pray our President and your honorable body:

1. To maintain all treaties with Indians with scrupulous fidelity until these compacts are modified or abrogated by the free and well-considered consent of the Indian tribes who were also parties to these treaties.

2. That since the number of Indian children within the limits of the United States does not probably exceed sixty thousand, or one-third the number of children in the public schools of some of our larger cities; and since treaties with many tribes already bind our government to provide a teacher for every thirty Indian children among these tribes: therefore we pray that a number of common schools, sufficient for the education of every child of every tribe, may be provided upon their reservations, and that industrial schools also may be established among them.

3. We pray that a title in fee-simple to at least one hundred and sixty acres of land may be granted to any Indian within the reservation occupied by his tribe, when he desires to hold land in severalty, and that said land shall be inalienable for twenty years.

4. We also earnestly pray for the recognition of Indian personalty and rights under the law, giving to Indians the protection of the law of the United States for their persons and property, and holding them strictly amenable to these laws; also giving them increased encouragements to industry, and opportunity to trade, and securing to them full religious liberty.

MEMORIAL LETTER OF THE INDIAN TREATY-KEEPING AND PROTECTIVE ASSOCIATION, PRESENTED WITH THEIR PETITION FOR 1882.

To the Senate and House of Representatives in Congress Assembled:

Again the women of a national Indian association beg leave to present to your honorable body the petition they have circulated and received again from the people of the United States. Their roll represents, at a low estimate, considerably more than a hundred thousand citizens,—instead of thirteen thousand as did their first, three years ago,—and is an earnest plea for a righteous, speedy, and permanent settlement of the Indian question.

Among the petitioners are many hundreds of churches, which have adopted the petition by a unanimous rising vote, this often having been taken at a regular Sabbath service; various popular meetings have also here presented their plea, similarly expressed; while the roll contains names of members of legislative bodies, of governors, judges, and lawyers; names of bishops and of many hundreds of the clergy—among the latter the entire ministry of three denominations in the city of Philadelphia and numbering nearly three hundred; names of the professors and students of theological seminaries like those at Hartford, Cambridge, Rochester, and Upland; colleges and universities like Yale, Harvard, Brown, Cornell, Rochester, Washington, and Lee; names of editors of leading periodicals; the boards of hundreds of missionary and other benevolent societies, not a few of these being national ones; with names of art, literary, and social clubs. Besides all these, the roll contains the signatures of hundreds of business and manufacturing firms, who control capital to the amount of many millions of dollars, and who employ many thousand operatives—all showing that not only has there been a rapid growth of sentiment among the religious and intellectual leaders of the community, demanding legislation which shall end oppression of Indians and secure to them full opportunity for industrial, mental, and religious development, but that the commercial interests of our land also are fast coming to demand a just and speedy settlement of the Indian question.

Permit an expression from the association who to-day present to your honorable body their third annual petition,—an association having sixteen State committees and one in each of the larger cities, with helpers in every State, all these committees being composed of patriotic Christian women; permit these to say that into their ears and hearts comes the cry of suffering, undefended, ever-endangered, Indian women and children, and that this cry is our appeal to you to secure for them legal protection; that the plea of Indian women for the sacred shield of law is the plea of the sisters, wives, and mothers of this nation for them, the plea of all womanhood, indeed, on their behalf to you as legislators and as men. Permit us also to say, that in laboring by every means in our power to fill our land with a knowledge of the present condition of Indians, and of our national obligations to them, we most deeply feel, that while justice demands the recognition of Indian personalty before the law, thus most surely and simply, it seems to us, securing to Indians protection and fostering care, we yet feel that legislation securing this recognition will be an honor to the present Congress and to our beloved country. For this legislation we most earnestly and respectfully pray.