386

THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

across his broad acres and sees his shocks of golden wheat, his fields of waving corn, his cotton with its bursting bolls; when he gathers peaches from his orchard and grapes from his vineyard, forgets the labor and privations of his past four years.

The white man had again told the Ishmaelite of Oklahoma to “ move on,” and as, like Dickens’ little Joe, he had been moving on and moving on ever since he was born, he obeyed.

When the Almighty pronounced these words: “Cursed be the ground for thy sake. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to thee. In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread,” he spoke to the red man as well as to the white man. In work, in the digging up the thorns and the thistles that the ground may yield his daily bread, for “ difficulties are God’s errands,” in meeting obstacles and overcoming them, has the white man alone grown strong, and able to rise as an individual and as a race.

The red man has been deprived of the great blessing of work. Lands and money have been given him. His bread and clothes have come to him without any effort on his part. He has been left in idleness and plenty to follow the wayward impulses of his own crude, savage nature, and in this consists his great .degradation. Wherever the Indian has become poor and obliged to work to gain a livelihood he has risen accord­ingly. The time will come when the United States Government will have given him all his lands and money, and the white man will have stolen or cheated him out of it, and by the sweat of his brow he will earn his daily bread. Then, and not before, will the Indian again take his place among the self-governing nations of the world.

It is a common impression that the Indians are a vanishing race, and that in another century they will be known only in history. Recent statistics show that there has been no serious diminution in the number of Indians on this continent since the discovery of America. So we may conclude that the Indian is here to stay for at least another century, a people destined ere long to become citizens of this country in a common, national home.

How we may best give them a Christian education then becomes a problem of great importance to us. I am told that in the Indian schools of the territory the teachers are able to tell from the youngest child whether its mother has ever received any education, or, as they express it, whether “ it has a school-mother.”

The Indian girl who is educated at Haskell or Carlisle, when her school life is over returns to her people, and in nearly every instance puts on her blanket and becomes the wife of a blanket Indian, to whom she is usually sold by her parents for a few ponies.

At the first glance, with this fact in view, the educating of the Indian girl is dis­heartening in the extreme. The adult Indian habits have been formed. All remedies for them must be palliative. But in the children there is hope, through the mother to the child, each generation growing better and wiser than the one preceding it. In this line of endeavor lies, it seem to me, the surest solution of this problem.

Through the sufferings of the mother has the human family ever received its bap­tism of regeneration. Through the suffering of the Mary Mother a Christ came to dying humanity.

The chapter in our national history which tells of our dealings with the Indian tribes from Plymouth to San Francisco, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, will be one of the darkesf and most disgraceful in our annals. No race will lift up at the Judgment such accusing hands against this nation as the Indian. We have cheated him out of one hunting-ground by compelling him to accept another, and have robbed him of the last by driving him to frenzy, and then punishing resistance with confisca­tion. The voices of their scattered dead will find an echo in the ages to come, and the crime of the white man against his red brother will be called at last for judgment.