THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
When it became evident that this great reform would be a success, the attention of the association was given to missionary work, to home building, hospital, educational and other work needed among the Indians on the reservations, and soon ten departments of practical work were shared by interested helpers in nearly all the states of the Union, and with encouraging success. During the last nine years, since these lines of effort were undertaken, the society has established directly or indirectly thirty-three mission stations, transferring these to permanent missionary societies when well established, giving with the mission its land, mission cottage, chapel, and all its property and improvements. The association has given special education to bright Indians, training them as physicians, nurses, teachers and missionaries to help and lead their people. It has built houses by loans, placing thus about a hundred Indians in civilized and Christian homes, and the loans are being honestly repaid. It has hospital, library and industrial departments, and has built twelve missionary cottages, chapels and schoolhouses. During its last year it expended $28,000 sending goods to tribes in special need to the amount of $3,000.
A glance at the oppressions of Indians at the beginning of this work shows them to have been practically without legal rights. They were subject to enforced removals from their own land; they were constantly robbed by marauders'and ruffian frontiersmen; they were under agents possessing despotic power, who could forbid trade among them, could suspend their chiefs, and arrest or drive from the reservation any unwelcome visitor. The Indians were not permitted to sell the natural products of the soil even when in a starving condition. They might be banished to reservations where farming was impossible though farming was required, and yet under such conditions were sometimes deprived of arms and ammunition for hunting, their only source of subsistence. Our nation practically prohibited all lines of work natural to the Indian, and then falsified its promises to furnish him means for farming. Today, by the success of the movement inaugurated under Divine Providence by the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian is lilted out of his old helplessness into the status of a man and citizen under law, is given the privilege of education, and his home and family can now be protected from ruffians and criminals.
In the old days, as a rule, the Indian home was a tepee or tent, a wickyup, hogan, bark campooda or dug-out, destitute of furniture and with no garden, field, meadow, wells, improvements, or domestic animals. Today there are thousands of comfortable homes, built of planks, logs, or better materials; many in different places are really tasteful and complete homes, and these are now surrounded with gardens, fields, orchards andother features of civilization, all constituting a widebeginningof the better era which has really dawned for the Indian race. Nor is the change in Indian character less marked. Under the old order of things the better human impulses were hindered or throttled; manhood and womanhood were humiliated and degraded, and many a character noble by nature, and many a mind finely endowed was stultified into utter helplessness and inaction by tyrannous conditions and the inescapable bondage of the reservation system, the sum of all oppression. Today the Indian, man or woman, who is conscious of the possession of character, the impulse to action felt by ability, the aspiration of power,physical or mental, has freedom to go where he will and make his own life; while he who desires education, development, culture—and there are not a few of these in the many tribes—can find his opportunity, his work, and his reward. Indian women are at last free to express the best that is in them, to embody in deeds the noblest instincts of maternity, and bravely to ask for their children the protections and privileges which have so lately come to themselves.
The results of the great change for the race are surprising when one considers the time involved. Gradually the way was preparing by Providence, and even under the reservation-government civilized industry had a beginning; but the great facts of progress are due to the changes of the last few years. One cannot but be surprised that already more than twenty-four thousand families are engaged in agriculture; that there is provision now made for three-quarters of the Indian children of school