The Word Carrier of Santee Normal Training School (Santee, Nebraska), 1907-05 - 1907-06

              The Word Carrier
OF
SANTEE NORMAL TRAINING SCHOOL.
VOLUME XXXVI.
HELPING THE RIGHT, EXPOSING THE WRONG.
NUMBER 3.
SANTEE, NEBRASKA.
MAY-JUNE 1907
THIRTY CENTS PER YEAR.
Our   Platform.
For Indians we want American Education ! We
want American Homes ! We want America^ Rights !
The result of which is American Citizenship! And
the Gospel is the power of their Salvation!
A Cry for Reservation Schools.
I know a little about Iudians—not very much,
hut a little, and what I do know was gotten
from actual association. The Indian is not
quarrelsome, nervous, treacherous nor vindictive. I never heard of an Indian beating his
wife nor maltreating his children, and I have
never seen older Indian boys bullying younger
ones. Indian children very rarely quarrel
among themselves. There is great attachment
among the whole family and when tbe Indian
man travels be takes bis wife and children and
parents or grandparents with him. In this he
is like the German, who takes his family with
him when he goes to the
beer garden, which is quite
a different thing from the
English habit of going off
and getting drunk alone, and
then coming home and taking
it out on the family. Tbe
man who takes his wife and
children with him wherever
he goes, is not wholly bad.
At Lodge Grass,Wyoming,
the Indians gave a small and
select aboriginal function in
my honor.    We sat in a circle, in a big teepee, around a
camp-fire, whose fitful glare
lighted up the dusky faces
and made   me think I was
in the land of  Peter  Pan.
Speeches were made;  there
was much  handshaking;  I
was adopted into the tribe
and given a new name; the
peace-pipe was passed; the squaws served the
feast.    And as we sat there in tbe strange weird
light.—three white men, a negro, and fifty Indians—a squaw came in.    She approached me
in an excited way and poured out a kind of eja-
culatory appeal. Then she hastily withdrew. In
a few minutes she came back and went through
the strange performance again. Nobody seemed
to pay the slightest attention to her.   She came
back the third time, and there was a note of woe
in her voice, like wail of  a  keener.    Plainly
enough, this squaw's performance was not a
part of the program.    She was an interloper.
After speaking an instant, she would run out as
if she expected to be forcibly repulsed.   "What
does she want?"    I asked a half-breed, seated
near.    "She wants you to bring back her little
girl",was the impassive reply.   "But I haven't
her little girl, where is the child she is talking
of?" "The out-agent came last week and took
her baby away to school.    Her heart is broken—it is   no  matter!"    And   the  half-breed
looked  stolidly into the  fire, as if that closed the subject.
"Her heart is broken—it is no matter!" A
mother's heart—Rachel weeping for her children and will not be comforted because they are
not. The Indians love their children to a degree that we whites do not love ours'. We
haven't the time—the vital thing to a civilized
white being his business, to his wife, society.
We delegate the building and keeping of our
homes to specialists and allow aliens to instruct our children. The Indian woman carries her baby on her back, and when the toddler
can walk a bit he tags lovingly to her skirt,
if she goes horse-back he perches behind on
the crupper or in front on the withers. The father looks on in silent satisfied approval. And
now comes ■ the out-agent and seizes the child,
soldiers with loaded guns are within easy call,
and often right at hand!    Years after, another
person may come back, but it isn't the babe
they lost.
There are forty-three Indian Non-Reservation
Schools in the United States, carried on bv the
Government. I realize the skill, patience and
purity of intent of those who teach in these
schools. Their motives are right beyond cavil,
and their methods good. But the" policy of
kidnapping children from their parents in the
name of Christian Education is a blunder beyond compare. The children cry of homesickness for a month and in this period of despair
many die. At Lodge Grass, Wyoming, is a
Reservation School, carried on with the consent
of the Indian Service, but with no financial
help from the Government,
tarily gave up an especially
land for this school. "It
home," he said to me.    The
no
An Indian volun-
valuable tract of
keep pappoose at
cry of the Indian
on every Reservation in America is for the Res-
THE  PRESENT MISSION   HOUSE AT OAHE, SOUTH   DAKOTA,
Built of granite boulders from the hills; the walls put up by Thomas L
himself with the aid of his neighbor Mr. Hans Sorenson.
ervation School—"It keep pappoose at home."
The Indian adult is a child. Teach him to have
a garden, to build a house, to care for cattle, to
milk a cow and raise poultry and the question
of education is solved. Books do not educate,
and whether the Indian can read and write is
little difference. But wheu we get him to plant
a fruit tree and watch it grow, it is an achievement. The Reservation School is a kindergarten. And every kindergarten is a little educational center for the entire community. The
kindergarten is a plan to educate parents. The
child educates its mother. Is love so plentiful
that you can afford to stamp upon it and break
the hearts of ten thousand mothers ? Conserve
your love—it is too scarce to flout. Work
mother-love up into life. Transmute it into
useful effort. A Reservation School breaks no
mother's heart, nor carries a cloud of unending gloom into a home. The Non-Reservation
school creates enmity, opposition, and sows
dragon's teeth. The results of the Non-Reservation Schools are not desired by the Indians.
And the Carlisle Indian when he goes back
finds it easier to accept the common ways of
his race than to fight against it. I may be
wrong, but I think that tears and terror do not
make for good, no matter how altruistically devised, and any plan of education which represses mother-love, instead of building on it,
will have to go when the common sense of the
people get a focus on it.
"My boy has been gone for three years, but
every night I am wakened by hearing him calling and crying for me," said an Indian woman
to me, and the curious part was that this woman
herself was a "Carlisle Indian " The Indian
squaw is not the drudge that some people imagine—she is the housekeeper and provider.
She cooks, weaves, strings beads, makes moccasins, and tans skins. She has to invent, devise and plan, and this exercise of her faculties
has made her the mental superior to her mate.
In tbe Lewis and Clark Expedition there were
thirty-four men and one woman. This woman,
Sacajawea, was the guide and chief counselor
of Lewis and Clark. She knew the fords, passes
and springs, and when food was scarce she
went to Indian villages, where making known
her wants to the squaws, she was given food
for her self and the men. For two thousand
miles she led the way afoot, her baby on her
back. When hopes sank in the hearts of the
men she cheered them forward. In Portland,
Oregon, the white women of the land have erected a statue of this brave Indian woman. The
artist has been singularly successful in her modeling—silent, sober, patient, firmly poised, she
looks out wistfully to the western mountains and
points the way. On her back is her pappoose,
chubby and content, innocent of the thought
that he is making history. This noble bronze
reveals the honest wife, the
loving mother, the faithful
friend, the unerring guide.
Thousands looking upon this
statue have been hushed into
tears. There is an earnestness in it, a purity of purpose, that rebukes frivolity
and makes one mentally uncover. And now you women who made this statue
possible, just imagine soldiers of tbe Government for
which Sacajawea lived and
toiled, going to her in the
name of Law, forcibly taking her pappoose under the
plea that she is not fit to be
trusted with its education!
She was fit to give it birth,
but not worthy to bring it
up ! Ob, prince of pedagogic
fallacies! There are other
Sacajaweas, hundreds of them, and in tho darkness they reach out for the beloved baby form,
and fear the coming day that will prove to them
that their woe is not merely a hideous dream of
the night, but an awful reality. "Her heart is
broken, it is no matter."—The Philistine in
The Oglala Light.
Riggs
man will
consider-
when   an
perform
An Indian's Philosophy
It is a great problem of how a
get eternal life and it ought to be
ed solemnly. In the olden days
Indian medicine man was about to
his ceremonies he had a great many rules to
obey. He had to obey, all his rules, and if
he did not obey his rules the people did not
regard him as a man. He very soon lost the
respect of the people.
We ought not to treat things of God as something common. Some people who preach the
word of God do it, not because they feel it a
duty, but because of the money that comes from
it. This shows in many ways. If their salaries happen to be cut short they just let the
whole thing go and they themselves do as they
please. This shows that they did not wholly
believe in God.
Paith is one of the things that will save a man
and it can save a man even if he has sunk pretty low. If this is in a man be is fit to go and
preach about God. He can help others by his example as well as words. Even if a missionary
has stopped being a missionary he ought not to
stop the good work. He ought to help it on
some other way. In this part of the country,
missionaries have come to us from other Indians
and we have houses of worship, holding services
every Sunday. But I hear that some of
our missionaries have turned out wrong, and
that is a great harm to the members of our
churches. B. Blackhoop.
Cannon Ball. N. Tl.