## Our Indian Schools and The System.

I am asked to talk to you for thirty minutes about Indian Schools.

I speak from wide, long, and varied experience with the Indians. Forty-eight years ago as an Army officer, I began to handle Indians on the frontier. First I commanded Indian Scouts, then assisted in negotiations with Indians, then had charge of tribes, then through two winter campaigns against them commanded Indians as scouts and guides, and during this time as the result of one campaign had charge of hundreds of Indians held as prisoners at the Post of Fort Sill, Indian Territory. I then took seventy-four selected bad leaders of these in chains to Florida. I soon removed their chains and there gave them such education and industrial training as I could under their prison life. Most of them acquired the English language, and quite a goodly number became able to write it. After three years they were released, and I arranged and took a part of the younger men to Hampton Institute, Va., and soon after, with Mrs. Pratt's help, brought forty-seven more, both boys and girls, from the Dakota tribes, and remained in charge of all these for more than a year. I then suggested an Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pa., inaugurated it by bringing 147 Indian boys and girls from Dakota and the Indian Territory, and conducted it for twenty-five years, during which time it grew to an annual attendance of above a thousand, coming from more than eighty different tribes. Hav-

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ing been retired from Army service I was relieved,
ten years ago, but have since kept up a wide cor-
respondence with the graduates and returned
pupils of this school.

During the Carlisle experience I visited most of
our Indian reservations and became well acquaint-
ed with all sorts of Indian management and mis-
sion work, and was constantly called to Wash-
ington with reference to my Indian duties.

Speaking to you from this experience, I say
that under the same environment and using the
same facilities, it is quite easy to educate Indians
in the English language and to train them to full
usefulness in civilized industries, and that with
best chances for their acquirement, high educa-
tion and skillful ability in industries, business and
professional life are all easy certainties for In-
dian youth. When properly prepared, Indian
youth are welcome in all our schools and industries.

About three hundred thousand of our population
are classed as Indians. A very considerable propor-
tion of these have white blood. There are men
and women on the rolls of the Indian system who
have as much as sixty-three parts of white blood
and only one of Indian. Almost all mixed bloods
are the products of white fathers and Indian
mothers. Many men among these mixed bloods,
through fatherly ambition and right chances,
have developed large ability and gained high place
in the Nation. Just now two of our National
Senators and two Members of the House of Rep-
resentatives have Indian blood.

But there have been also great men of pure In-
dian blood. Uneducated and untrained, they have
shown remarkable state-craft and generalship.

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Among these, Red Jacket, Tecumseh, Chief Joseph and scores of others, both in the earlier history of the country and in these later days, many of whom became my personal friends. If these had been given education and the chance, they would have written their names high on the scroll of America's wonderful progress.

At no time in the history of the country has it been impossible for young Indians to move out from their tribes and to receive a welcome in our civilized life and to gain as high an education and as great skill as was possible for them to absorb, and to remain in our civilization and go on to still greater perfection. They only needed encouragement and the proper help. The overpowering barrier has been the tribal segregating system enforced by our government.

The negroes were forced to come to America, and were forcibly distributed among our people, and by the very necessities of the case compelled to learn the language and acquire the industries their enslaved condition made necessary. They have become ten millions of useful citizens. None of them can speak their old languages, or have habits of the old aboriginal life of their tribes. On the contrary, since slavery was abolished, they have made remarkable progress in acquiring intelligence and varied industrial usefulness, and have entered the higher walks of business and the profession, and have accumulated vast aggregate wealth.

Contact with the white race was the negroes' salvation.

At vast expense we segregated and imprisoned the Indians apart from all right contact with

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our life on reservations by tribes, and made them
prisoners, and by the most ingenious devices and
the most relentless and heartless systems of con-
trol compelled them to continue in their old life.
One-fourth of the money we spent in enforcing
Indians to continue their tribal life, if wisely
spent in merging them into our life and industries,
as Washington, Jefferson and other fathers of the
Republic urged, would have incorporated them as
useful, self-supporting citizens long ago.

Our school histories and daily published accounts of the Indians and almost all of our writings have presented false views of their qualities and character.

The Indian is as much entitled to be judged by
comparison as any man. Judged by this, he is
not as brutal as the boasted race which has en-
compassed and oppressed him. He is kindly and
responsive and even more charitable than the
educated and trained people of the master race.

The influences which have controlled the Indian
from the beginning have all persuaded, hired or
compelled him to segregated tribalism. The in-
fluences that bear upon him to-day are increasingly
strong and insidious in this purpose. There has
never been an honest, continuous and strong pur-
pose in the system to recognize the man as being
capable of the qualities and to give him a proper
chance to acquire the ability of American citizen-
ship. If, perchance, in limited numbers he has
been permitted to go beyond the reservation
among our citizens for some education, training
and experience towards this ability, it has almost
universally been his lot to be hired, persuaded or
compelled to return to his people and become one
of the mass.

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The reservation has always been a prison, and the army was used to establish and enforce this prison life. The Indian was hired to continue tribal by rations, and persuaded by the feeble systems of tribal schools, and inefficient farm training, and allured by issues of cattle and other stock, and enticed by lands in severalty which riveted him to tribalism; and in these later days is enticed by the loan of government money to help develop, tribally, his surroundings which keeps him in tribal duress. This will teach him one more sad lesson that "He that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing," but it thrives the system. The system asked Congress and was given about a million dollars for this new tribal riveting scheme.

The Government always was and is now the only employer on the reservations. There was no diversity of industries allowed, no material employment outside of agriculture, and the very system of agricultural training invited failure everywhere because of its weak and incompetent quality and remoteness from market. One farmer has been held sufficient to instruct hundreds of families of Indians ignorant of farming and scattered over wide areas. Thus any sort of right and speedy accomplishment was impossible. I might go into details and show how this whole system of industrial instruction and management has always been calculated to breed just the failure which has resulted, but you only asked me to talk of schools.

An unpleasant duty requires me to speak with great positiveness about the qualities and false reputations of the various kinds of schools, and

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I desire to expose the reasons for the large failure
which has followed the use of the widest systems
adopted.

The Indian system has not always been in the
hands of capable, humane and wise management,
intent on elevating the Indians into real manhood
and citizenship. More than thirty-six years ago
it was suggested, and in part accepted, that one
good way to educate and train the Indians into the
capacity and merge them into our citizenship, was
through the use of industrial schools established in
the surroundings of our best American civilization,
and from these schools push them individually out
into the general school system of the country and
into its avenues of industry. This became the only
scheme ever adopted by the Government intended
to merge the Indians into becoming co-equal Amer-
icans. Why it has in part been unsuccessful is one
object of this paper.

There had been day schools among the Indians
for more than two hundred years. I know a
tribe which has had day schools for longer than
that, and they are still but a compact tribe of In-
dians under the care of the system. For a hun-
dred years we have had day schools among the five
thousand Indians on their reservations in the State
of New York, but such schools have not lifted them
out from the babyhood of dependent tribal life into
the manhood of American citizenship, but have
rather indurated their tribalism. The Society of
Friends has maintained a tribal school in one of
these tribes for one hundred and twelve years,
without making a single convert and with the same
meager result as the day schools among those In-
dians.

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Scarcely an Indian of the several tribes in New York so educated has left his tribe and gone out into American life. A contrasting proof of the efficiency of another system, and its results is the fact that over three hundred of the youth of these tribes were permitted to attend the new system of non-reservation schools during the last twenty-five years, and near half of them have abandoned tribal life, moved out into our communities and become independent, useful citizens, successfully engaged in the varied pursuits of the many American communities in which they live.

It can therefore be easily seen that educated among our people, Indians aspire to our life, but weakly educated at home in day schools, they adhere more tenaciously to tribal life. The courage and ability of our American citizenship is as easily and quickly gained by Indians as by the people of the many other races we have incorporated, but it must be through the same contact with our citizens which we accord to them. Swimming is only learned by going into the water.

I intend to use this address widely, and therefore wish to expose here one of the most baneful influences that has ever controlled and perverted the Indian school system and discredited and hindered its highest educational purpose. More than twenty years ago, while at Carlisle, there was a newspaper correspondent in this city of Washington, engaged in writing about public matters through the columns of an eminent New York newspaper. He persistently attacked the non-reservation system of educating Indians. He became the tool of the Indian system, and now and then was sent out by that system to make some

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investigations on Indian reservations. He increased his income by becoming the Washington representative of the Indian Rights Association in addition to his newpaper work. In these double capacities, he engaged in wide criticism and wrote himself into notoriety by assuming to praise and blame right and left.

He was then appointed a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners, which is a body of "ten men eminent for intelligence and philanthropy" created by law at President Grant's request for the special purpose of careful investigation into Indian matters everywhere, with a view to helping the administration to overcome the then rampant maladministration and defects of management.

This man assumed dictatorial utterance and misrepresentation in regard to my work at Carlisle, which he never visited. I always met these assults. After about two years as a member of the Board of Commissioners, he wrote two letters containing false statements. I sent copies of these letters to a United States Senator, specially interested in my work, and called his attention to their quality, asserting that a necessary part of right, "intelligence" was truthfulness, and inviting attention to the fact that nothing that the man did indicated that he was "philanthropic;" that all his acts were calculated to tear down and not to build up. The Senator went to the Secretary of the Interior with my letter and the two newspaper letters. On reading these, the Secretary wrote a personal note to this newspaper correspondent, Washington Agent of the Indian Rights Association and a member of the Board of

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Indian Commissioners, demanding his resignation from the Board, whereupon he went off that Board, and also soon after out of his position as Washington Secretary of the Indian Rights Association.

During a Presidential campaign, he wrote a laudatory book for campaign purposes, covering his view of the career of one of the candidates. That candidate was elected and rewarded him for his laudation by making him Commissioner of Indian Affairs and placing him in charge of the vast estate of the Indians and their development. The position of Commissioner of Indian Affairs has long been a plum for political service, which inevitably influences perpetual change in the personnel throughout that department.

While in office this Commissioner began the destruction of the non-reservation schools. He wrote a letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives recommending that seven different non-reservation Indian schools be abandoned. He then insidiously labored to have such schools turned over for use as eleemosynary institutions to the States in which they were located. This was offering a direct bribe to support his purposes to each of the Congressional delegations from the States in which these schools were located. Three of these schools were by special laws so given to States. These schools were the property of the people of the United States at large, and if abandonment was needed, could have been sold for large sums of money and the proceeds put back into the Treasury, where they belonged; for in every case they had cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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During this period there were fifteen or more infamous stories widely circulated through the newspapers about alleged Carlisle graduates. They were ingeniously worded and in every case declared crimes and misconduct. Every case alleged, save two, was absolutely and unqualifiedly false, both as to name and events, no such Indians having been at the Carlisle school and no such events as alleged having occurred. In one case the name of an ex-student of Carlisle was used. The charges were atrocious, but without the shadow of foundation in fact, and the Indian himself was most worthy. In the other case it was alleged that the outlaw "Apache Kid was a graduate of the Carlisle Indian University," and there had acquired great literary and other competence, and had returned home to become the terror of the Territory of Arizona. The description was lurid and the article was published widely, especially in the Sunday papers. It so happened that there was an "Apache Kid" who was terrorizing the Territory of Arizona, which was the only truth in the story. Kid was never a pupil of any Indian school and was an outlaw before Carlisle School was established and before the Government began to educate the Apaches, and remained an outlaw to the end. The attention of many of the papers publishing this article was called to the facts in the case, but none of them published such facts, which indicated they were under perverting espionage.

These fake stories, accompanied by other like misrepresentation from such noted source, have filled the country with unwarranted doubt about the results of Indian education, and is my warrant for making this exposure.

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Soon after becoming Commissioner, in addition to his activities before Congress, he began increasing day schools and oppressing non-reservation schools and did all that he could to destroy the latter through false representations in magazine and newspaper articles and by placing limitations upon the securing of pupils for said schools. and by dismissing and transferring their employes. In a magazine article, he falsely declared that "85 per cent of the Indians from non-reservation Indian schools, such as Carlisle and others, sooner or later revert to the blanket." He asserted that the Indian day school was the only school to do the work.

His immediate predecessor twice during his term of office had instituted thorough inquiries throughout all the reservations covering the products of the non-reservation schools, and published in two different annual reports, first, that "3 per cent of such products were excellent, 73 per cent good and 24 per cent poor and bad." Two years later a like investigation was made and "10 per cent" of such products were reported as "excellent, 76 per cent compare favorably with white boys and girls under similar circumstances, and 13 per cent, while having raised themselves somewhat above the level of the Indians in the same environment, the result of their education cannot be said to be good," and only "one per cent prove by their lives and actions that they have not been benefited." This new Commissioner was called upon to furnish the data covering his contrary allegations, but he failed to respond.

At the very same time he was publishing these outrageous misstatements this Commissioner was paying many hundreds of Indians educated and

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qualified therefor in the non-reservation schools,
for their useful services in important positions
throughout the Indian School and other service as
school superintendents, teachers, disciplinarians,
clerks, matrons, etc. No day school products
reach such usefulness.

While in office as Commissioner he secured the
passage of a law by Congress prohibiting Indian
youth from going away from the reservation for
education until they had attained the age of fif-
teen years.

Before his term of office as Commissioner ex-
pired he was found so devious in furnishing in-
formation to one of the Indian Committees of
Congress having in charge the compiling of the
Indian Appropriation Bill, that the Committee
notified the Secretary of the Interior that they
would not permit him to appear before the Com-
mittee any more in reference to Indian matters;
that the Secretary would have to send someone
else or come himself.

Though out of office for quite a number of years,
but still newspaper correspondent, magazine and
book writer, this ex-Commissioner continues to
assert in favor of day schools among Indians and
against non-reservation schools. In his recent
book, "In Red Man's Land," he plausibly says:

"I have always believed that the key to the
problem of Indian education lies not in establishing
more of the big institutions, but in the multi-
plication of the little day schools to which the
children can come every morning and from which
they can go home every night. In the family
circle the children describe the day's happenings
at school, and the parents absorb unconsciously
some of the message the teacher is bringing

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from the outside world. The teacher, in turn,
catches some of the atmosphere of the home
from the children, and is able to do better work
with them in consequence. Through the mutual
understanding thus developed an opening is made
for the missionary; and when you have a whole
camp or village subject to the leaven, it seems to
me you are contributing to a scheme of race
elevation on pretty broad lines."

Against this view, I place this extract from a
recent letter from a day school teacher among
the Indians in Arizona:

"Any one seeing these children at the open-
ing of school would not think of such a sug-
gestion. Their condition is beyond description
though I shall endeavor to give you some idea.
Their feet, hands, and neck are encrusted like
an alligator, with great cracks and sores on them.
Their bodies covered with sores and their faces,
in some cases, one solid scab. Their heads one
solid mass of sores, caused by vermin. It takes
several weeks to get them in shape, as their
heads have to be hand-picked for a while, for
no comb can be used 'till the sores are cured
up. I tried an experiment for two weeks, let
them go without cleaning their heads of vermin,
then cleaned them up and kept count of the ver-
min. One head produced a crop of seven dozen
and the average was about five dozen. There
were but two girls free or clean of vermin. I
am going thus into detail so that you may know
the conditions to be met and overcome.

We kept all clothing here to keep it free of
body vermin and from being infected with germs.

One might ask, why should they have their
heads cleaned of vermin so frequently. Well,

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their small sisters and brothers are so infected
that they get a new supply every night. They
sleep on filthy sheepskins, alive with vermin,
in many cases."

The facts are that, because of the lack of
facilities and the inevitable circumstances sur-
rounding Indian day schools, they do not free
Indian youth from the vermin so universal
throughout their camps. Neither is any material
or quick progress in intelligence or ability gained.
The assumption that day schools greatly help
the family is proven by the results to be largely
imaginary.

In this same book the ex-Commissioner gives
his oft-repeated and misleading statements
against the quality, character and results of the
non-reservation schools, which are flatly con-
tradicted by what I have already presented. His
statements are not even plausible.

As a contrast to the sad experiences of the day
school teacher I have quoted, I have seen forty
Indian boys and girls arrive at one time at a
non-reservation school, many of them from tribal
schools. These boys and girls were not assigned
rooms or permitted to go about the quarters un-
til they were thoroughly policed; the boys un-
der the direction of the disciplinarian had their
hair cut by their fellow tribesmen already
students at the school, who then used fine-tooth
combs, and relieved their heads and bodies of
all vermin. The girls under the direction of the
matron, were also thoroughly combed. All were
then put through the bath and clad in entire new
clothing and made fit to occupy rooms with their
predecessors. Their clothes brought from camp
were put through the laundry and were found

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to be infected with thousands of body lice, so
that thorough steaming and cooking was the
only cure. In this non-reservation school every
boy and girl had a fine-tooth comb, and was re-
quired to daily keep their heads and bodies
clean. Periodically, under the direction of the
Disciplinarian and the Matron, the boys and girls
had their heads combed by other boys and girls
and the results reported until absolute cleanli-
ness resulted. By this means the school was
made and kept free from vermin.

I make this statement in closing: I have
known ex-Commissioner Francis E. Leupp for
more than twenty years. I doubt if there is one
Indian in the United States who will say that
Mr. Leupp ever took him by the hand and en-
couraged and materially aided him to enter the
avenues of higher education and usefulness look-
ing to citizenship. I have never found one such.

Mr. Leupp's general quality of queering himself
in writing about Indians is well illustrated in his
book, "The Indian and His Problem."

On page 162, he says, "Many Indians are fine
blacksmiths, and one of the best of these is stone
blind."

That any "stone blind" mechanic can possibly
rank among the "best" of his craft is prepos-
terous and that a "stone blind" person, dependent
on the sense of touch to replace eyesight should
rank among "the best" as a "blacksmith" is
ridiculous. Think of a "stone blind" man mak-
ing a shoe out of red hot iron, fitting it to a
vicious mule and then nailing it on the animal.

His recent and latest book, "In Red Man's
Land," by cute management, has been placed
in the Sunday Schools of our churches as a text-

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book to be studied according to a formula specially arranged. It is totally unfit for such uses.

The book contains nine pictures. The first picture in the book is a fabricated mendacity: it is a picture of two Indians wearing feathered war bonnets and in their native dress. Underneath, it says “Present Day Warriors.” The facts are that there are now no such Indian “warriors,” nor have there been any of that sort for a good many years. The Indian warriors of to-day are regularly enlisted in the United States army or navy, serving just as all other army and navy men serve. The government has had an army of Indian police to maintain order on the various reservations, but they wear only civilized uniforms.

This “Present Day Warriors” picture belongs to the Wild West Show business, which was especially nursed by this Commissioner while in office. I was living in Denver, Colorado, at the time, and five or six times during his term of office he loaned to the various great conventions assembling in that city, parties of Indians from the nearby reservations, who instructed thereto would come painted and feathered to ride in the parades and amuse the crowds. Having the official sanction of the Government through this Commissioner, they gladly took the holiday outside their prison reservations at somebody else’s expense and paraded themselves as desired, and thus led our people to conclude the Indians are incurably aboriginal.

I saw young men and young women that had been educated in Indian schools riding in these parades, thus misrepresenting themselves and

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their people, encouraged to do this by those in
authority over them.

All of the other pictures in this book save one
are pictures of the poverty of low Indian life,
and therefore give a hopeless view. The one ex-
ception is a little frame-house and a barn, styled
"Indian Homes, the Best of the New Type." The
chances are that it is a picture of the home of an
Indian graduate of a non-reservation school and
may have been constructed by himself through
having learned the trade of carpenter, which all
these schools teach. These graduates have long
been and are leaders of their people towards
civilized living.

Perpetual tribalism and the consequent endless
control by the Indian System has always been
the limit of Mr. Leupp's vision for the Indians
and the basis for his arguments. This suits the
system and all that profit by it. Slave holding
thrived on limiting intelligence and could see no
virtue in individual freedom and citizen chances
for the negro. Indian holding has the same in-
firmity and therefore contends for the meager
education and the continuance of the environ-
ment which will not disturb the Indian System.
The churches through their similar segregating
systems of Indian missions, unconsciously work
hand in glove with, and accentuate the System.
Defamation and clamor against the higher edu-
cated "returned student" is part of the campaign.
It will not do to have Indians around who know
better.

It was a stroke of genius that succeeded in
getting Mr. Leupp's book about Indians into the
curriculum of the Sunday Schools, and of course
enhances the sale of the book. But why should

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any church, through its Sunday Schools, take
up such a false text-book to mis-inform their
students about real conditions among the In-
dians? The Rev. Thomas C. Moffatt, who is in
charge of all Indian Missionary work of the
Presbyterian church, has written, "The Indian on
a New Trail," which is a very widely informing
book about Indians and missions among them,
far better adapted for church and Sunday School
uses. It is filled with hope by statements of the
progress the race has made, and contains pic-
tures that well illustrate such progress.

My plan has long been voiced in this —to
civilize the Indian, get him into civilization.
Then keep him there and increase his usefulness.
Having through bad treatment been made the
most backward among our people, he needs and
deserves the best chances in schools and in every
other way in order to quickly reach his only place
of safety, which is the ability to care for himself
and his own property in competition with all
other Americans, and free from all special sys-
tem management. To get these qualities he
must be environed by them, which is impossible
in the tribe and reservation. To hold him to less
than this only perpetuates the Indian System,
and is both cruel and criminal.