 | An Indian on the Problems of His Race. |  |
2. II. AS REGARDS THE INDIAN RESERVATIONS.
It was good economy, no doubt, for the United States to free our people on the great Sioux and other reservations, instead of keeping a standing army to fight them in case they should take to the warpath. And yet the system is a bad one for our people. It kills energy and begets idleness, the mother of vice. It certainly will prove a fatal blow to our people if long continued. The government ought to find something for them to do, although it might pay it but little or nothing. It is too much like fattening animals. It forms a nucleus where unprincipled lazy white men gather whose only aim is to satisfy the greed of appetite and the lowest passions of their nature. Most of them, through marriage, become "squaw men," drawing rations from the tribe to whom their wife belongs. And so it is our people are imposed upon, and becoming mixed with the vilest of white men, who are much worse than savages, as is shown by the devil that is born and developed in the half-breeds. The only way I can see out of the present muddle is for steps to be at once taken whereby each family shall have allotted to them a certain number of acres of good farming land which cannot be sold by them for a term of years, and help them out of the Indian funds, as occasion requires, and only have families of near kin, or those socially connected, have allotments together, thereby avoiding outlaws and white vagabonds who swarm at the present time like hungry bees about our agencies to rob and steal at payment times.
Break up as soon as possible the last vestige of tribal relations. Teach them to know that they owe allegiance to no man on earth except the great chief of the United States. Make each one a present of a beautiful United States flag. They take easily to object lessons, and will soon learn to love the Stars and Stripes, and take great pride in feeling its image in their hearts. They must be taught that they cannot longer live as their fathers did, but must live as white men do, or else lie down and die before the cruel march of civilization. I have sent many children to the government Indian industrial schools, among whom were my own and grandchildren, and have carefully watched the workings of these schools, and was indeed proud to visit them as they met on the World's Fair grounds and exhibited the works which astonished the teachers of white schools. Hence I believe those government schools were conceived by the Great Spirit, and born in the hearts of noble men and women, and fully believe when a great majority of the 28,000 children between six and sixteen who are still unprovided for shall be gathered into the school, and when the reservations are broken up and the people scattered in houses of their own, that then and not until then will the great Indian problem be solved.
| An Indian on the Problems of His Race. | |