The Word Carrier of Santee Normal Training School (Santee, Nebraska), 1904-09 - 1904-10

              the Word Carrier
ok Santee Normal Training School.
vonuME  XXXIII.
HELPING    THE    RIGHT.    EXPOSING    THE    WRONG.
NUMBER 5.
SANTEE, NEBRASKA.
SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER, 1904.
THIRTY CENTS PER YEAR.
Our Platform.
For Indians we want American Education!
We want American Homes! We want American Rights! Tlie result of which is American Citizenship! And the Gospel is the power
of God for their Salvation!
Perverting Trust Funds.
A new scheme has been inaugurated by our
Roman Catholic bretheren with the aid of the
Commissioner of Indian Affairs for getting
church schools supported from Indian tribal
money. A petition is presented to the Indian
Office signed by some of the Indians of a tribe,
it does not seem material how many or how
few, asking that a specified church school be supported out of their tribal trust funds, and thereupon a school contract is issued by the Indian
Office. Seven such contracts have been issued to
the Roman Catholics, but as yet none to any
other denomination, although they are free to
apply for them after the same fashion.
Now tribal trust funds belong to the whole
tribe and no section of the tribe less than a
clear majority has any legal right to dispose of
them. For a minority to take the tribal funds
and apply them to their own uses is an iRegal
perversion of trust funds for which the guardian of those funds, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, should be held responsible. And
no one who knows the Indians on the Pine
Ridge, Rosebud, and Crow Creek reservations
can believe it possible that a majority of the
a<" .It Indians on those reservations ever signed
those petitions for giving these school con-
tr cts to the Romanists. The character of
thi- transaction is evident on the face of it.
The scheme is so farcical in its working out
that we do not wonder the Commissioner of Indian Affairs now drops the fiction of tribal pe-
tion and consent and proposes to issue school
contracts to any one who may apply, and pay
them from "trust funds" belonging to the Indians, without their knowledge or consent. We
all know what would happen to a plain citizen
who should so pervert trust funds. What makes
the difference?
What many of the Indians have contended
for is a horse of another color. When the
Government has taken the Indians' money and
put it into government schools the Indians
have asked that those of them who did not wish
to have their children in the government schools
be allowed at least enough to clothe their children when they supported them at other schools.
They have sought only to get their individual
rights. They have not tried to take their
neighbor's share without his consent and turn
it to their own account.
Married.
Crotzer-Baine. In Sisseton, So. Dak.,
August 6, 1904, Archibald Crotzer, of Oklahoma, and Martha Ann Baine, of Sisseton
Agency. Their home wiR be in Darlington,
Oklahoma.
Crothers-Morris. In Sisseton, So. Dak.,
by Rev. Thomas L. Riggs, uncle of the bride,
Rev. William H. Crothers, of Fort Morgan,
Col., and Nina Margaret Morris of Sisseton.
Their home wiR be at Fort Morgan, Col.
Things Noticeable in this Number.
Miss Annie Beecher Scoville was not by any
means a "tender foot" on Indian lands but she
had a speeech to make, and to ge t fresh fa cts made
a special trip of five hundred miles through the
reservations.    Study her conclusions.
For ways that are dark,and tricks that are vain,
watch the Catholic Bureau and Commissioner of
Indian Affairs manipulate the Indian trust funds.
Study the difficulties of the beginnings of Indian mission work as iUustrated by work among
the Navahoes. With that, consider the ultimate success as given in Seventy years among
the Dakotas.
The Field.
Not long ago I stood outside of a Government school building in the midst of the plains
and heard the wailing for the dead. It was the
first of September. All day the Dakotas had
been bringing in and giving up their children
as the law requires and now as night fell a
mother wailed as dead her five year old baby
taken from her by force that it might forget her
language and her lips. The people of Rain-in-
the-face and Sitting Bull, of Grass and Thunder
Hawk paid tribute in their children to their conquerors. The next morning the parents went
thirty, forty miles away to a home that can never
have children over five years old in its care.
This is a war measure. We fought these
Dakotans for a quarter of a century over many
miles from the Platte to Canada, we destroyed the buffalo herds before we could conquer them, penned them into their arid reservation. In many a village there is not a woman
who has not been under fire, not a woman who |
had not been well able to cloth and feed her
family in the old days, not a woman who bad not
looked well to that family and ruled it with a
rod of iron. Their life, social, religious and economic we have shattered, and their children
are theirs for only a few brief years. These
women, and their lonely homes are your field.
But follow the child—see that frantic baby screaming itself black in the face, fighting
with baby hands the kindest efforts of white
teachers, convulsed with fear of voice and eyes
and skin, all strange and horrid, that is the beginning of school to many an Indian child. If
it has the kindest most careful teaching still the
nervous strain of the new language, new food
new customs, new faces, can hardly be comprehended. The little life is swept under a great
flood of new experiences that often wrecks the
body and duRs the mind. Is it any wonder that
a large per cent die? We caR them a dying race,
but we should hesitate to subject our sturdiest
babies to such a strain of fear and excitement.
Can't you answer the questions put by a teacher,
"Why when they are sick do they gain faster
in the poor life of the camp, than in the best
care the school can give them?"
Oh, women all, there is something in a mother's arms, ignorant and dirty tho' she may be,
that a baby needs. These children of a conquered race, which our government is trying to
save—they are your field.
You send your child to a public school where
there is no religious teaching but back of it is
the christian home. These children from five to
eighteen are to go untaught in the best, the root
of aR our progress in this world and hope in
another,unless you teach them. Back of these
forced recruits of a public school system lie
pagan homes, and days of war.
When the people were first captured and their
teepees crowded about the great dance house, and
their painting, and their wild dress and frantic dance were their life—not put on for a wild
west show—and there were no schools forchfld-
ren, no help for sick and little pity for redskins
anywhere, you went into this field.
Your missionary set up his house over against
the dance house. He, and often she, taught
and nursed, built and planted fields—was in all
things the model for these people.
The log church on Sunday was his field but
the school where he taught old and young to
read the Dakota Bible was the necessary helpmeet of all preaching. Sound sense has been the
heritage of our church, the school and church
have stood together in building the village from
New England even to this lonely Indian camp,
but our church never was more ready to meet
the situation than among these Teton Sioux.
Forty years of study and labor had translated
the Scripture and trained a family to know the
Dakota language and the Dakota heart and
need.    Moreover the converts of those early
missions were ready to be native teachers.
The result has been great. We have today
twelve Dakota Churches—Congregational truly
in that each member aids in support and government of his church. But it is not to support
their own church alone that they give, for there
is a Native Missionary Society that has this year
given $900 toward the work of the field—out
of our abundance have we equalled this ?
But steadily the broad scholarship of your
missionaries built up a school system that has
never been equalled in its fitness to the needs
of a wild people.
From the little mission school, where parent
and child learned to read their Dakota Bible, to
Santee with its normal training, its correspondence classes, its industrial work fitted to their
own needs, the foundation of a school system
that is for the people and springs from the people has been developed.
This work, building not in wood or stone, but
in men, a church, and establishing schools, has
created a new phase of the work.
Hundreds of young Indians have been educated in mission school and government school,
east and west, and have taken their land to
go to work, and now their children are growing
up and from that educated christian home we
take every child at five years of age and put
him with hundreds of others, untrained, pagan,
into the government school. Would you do it
for yours? Do you wonder that it drives progressive Indians to leave their land, or lazy
ones to make little use of their advantages ?
Those young parents, with all the new questions of life before them are your field. How
are you to lead them in the building up of homes
if there is never a child over five years in such
homes. How can thrift, and seR-sacrifice and
wisdom grow under such conditions?
Your little mission school was once the refuge of the people. You have done away with
it. Fort Berthold and Oahe offered Christian
home life for the children of two reservations,
you have closed them. Such economy cuts the
tap root not only of Santee, but of the church
work among the northern reservations.
Our government can not provide for the religious training of these children. Your field
lies among the children to see that we do not
make educated pagans of them. If you do not
see the danger, the Indians do, and they ask
for help not alone in money but in leadership.
One group of Christian parents has asked
for a camp school and offered to raise among
themselves $20 per month to pay a teacher.
Such initiative is new among Indians—it is a
better fruit of your work than you can fully
estimate. They have but little money and this
choice in spending speaks their heart. WiR you
meet them here?
Today land is being aRotted,wages paid,the people will be very weak and foolish; and if you fail
them, you are like one who fails to gather in his
harvest after putting in a good summer's work.
With a little district school and village church
for the center of their home life your crop will,
be christian.
If possible at this juncture instead of cut^
ting off our secondary schools we should reestablish the mission day school. In this we'
not only teach the children of our christian people but by wise co-operation with parents, we
train those parents to help themselves and their
children. This work is not infringing on the
work of the government school. Our primary
schools reach the people as public and political
schools can not.
The field of our work among the Indians then
lies among the old and defeated, the young and
educated Indian, and for both classes today, as
nineeten hundred years ago, a little child shaR
lead them—can you afford to let that child
grow up untaught of Christ?—Address of Miss
Annie Beecher Scoville at Des Moines la.