Carlisle published a newspaper for students (Take a look👇)
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Send THE OSAGE a plague of small pox? (Murder them?)
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from the pdf:
PRATT WRITES: Against
the wishes of professional Indian philanthropists (?) who demanded she return to
and help her people, we urged her and she stayed in (PA) to practice her (Nursing) profession.
She has never been without employment,
has fifteen dollars per week and sometimes twenty-five, has helped her family
not a little, and has a bank account of several hundred dollars. This is disintegration of the tribes actually begun. Shall we for any reason whatsoever, remand her
to the base destructive influences of her tribe, to be swallowed up and lost? We have scores of similar cases, and might
have had hundreds and even thousands but for the false principle of always
pouring back into the tribe (leaving his prison school).
We have saddled the
poor Indian the destroying influences of a great pension system and the most
serious work that confronts us in our efforts to make a self-supporting man of
him is the curtailing and elimination of that system. The Osages have $9,000,000 (million) in the
United States Treasury, the interest of which at 5 percent is distributed among
them semi-annually. They occupy a domain fifty miles square, some of it the
best lands in the west. They do not work
because they need not. They spend their
time in debauchery and depravity, encouraged by the surrounding white
influences. Twenty-five years ago they numbered 3490; fifteen years later,
2206; and today they number a bare 1500. Query: Would not the introduction of smallpox at once be
a more humane method of ending the Osage problem. ____ (anyone see the movie "Killers of the Flower Moon"?)
Under their
recent treaty, the Chippewas of Minnesota are expecting to have ultimately from
$30,000,000 to $50,000,000 in the Treasury at interest. They now number over 6500. Twenty years ago, like
the Osages, and from the same causes, they will be reduced one half. Could the ingenuity of Satan devise a greater
evil under a semblance of good? Good
bye, Chippewas!
Experience shows
that Indians massed on reservations can absorb all the educational, religious
and other help given them there and not develop one tittle of a disposition to
become individually independent and citizens.
It is hard to
sidetrack a lie when it goes well started from a high source considered
responsible. Last year it was frequently asserted by a prominent Member in
Congress that Indian children were practically kidnapped and sent to Carlisle and
other Eastern schools by force. Not being
on the floor of the House to contradict it, we contradicted it in a Washington
paper, while Congress was yet in session. This year the same person reiterated the
statement. Two days afterwards, we got
the Congressional Record and saw it. We
then telegraphed to a member of Congress as follows: “ Of the2300 children received into
this school during its 13 years, not one, except 112 Apache youth from the
prisoners in Florida, came here under any other constraint than that of kind
and proper argument, and neither M r. ------- nor anyone else either out of or
in the Indian Service can establish the contrary; whereas there is not a day school
or a boarding school on the great Sioux reservation nor on many of the other reservations,
which do not have Indian police regularly on duty chasing down and enforcing
attendance of students, and to compel attendance at which schools the Agent
does not often deny rations and resort to the same forces, Mr. -------- misalleges
are used to fill eastern schools.
Congress is
being greatly misinformed in this matter.”
Our telegram did not reach the gentleman until after the bill had gone
beyond where he could answer. But why
make such statements, as though a great wrong was being done, when Congress has
made legal provision for enforcing attendance by withholding rations and other supplies from whole
families who will not send their children to the schools.
The Indian is a
man, capable in all respects as we are. His
development is governed absolutely by his environment.
Savagery
naturally enforces savagery, civilization enforces civilization. Surrounded by civilization, it is impossible
for him to remain a savage; surrounded by savagery it is almost impossible for
him to either become or remain civilized.
Why then keep up
the farce of feeding our civilization to the Indians?
It is more than
folly and worse than ridiculous to constantly declare (war) against reservations and
tribal influences and to be at the same time always and almost universally
doing only those things which compact the tribe and strengthen the reservation.
At the annual
convention of Methodist church in Chicago to consider the subject of education
and church work the Rev. J. C. Hartzell, general educational agent of the
church in the south, advocated the abolition of the color line both in church
and school. Here is
progress.
From the
standpoint of the Eastern philanthropists (Lake Mohonk) (rich white industrialists) there is but one side
to the Indian question; while, in reality the problem has as many phases as
there are tribes. A statement regarding
one of the thirty-two tribes in the Indian Territory does not necessarily apply
to another.
When the Cherokee Commission
reported that “ the Pawnees defer to the judgement of their educated and
English-speaking young men,” the fact had a special significance. Of the twenty-four tribes visited by the
commission, the Pawnees alone would listen to or be guided by the counsels of
their young men. - (Edward F. Watrous, in Christian Register.)
The young men of
the Pawnees have largely attended schools away from the tribe, which fact alone
is sufficient reason for the above observation.
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