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Show EEPORT OF THE BOARD OF INDIAN COMMISSIONERS. 153 APPENDIX A e, No. 31. ST. PETER, MINNESOTA, June 2, 1871. DEAR SIR: I hasten to comply with your request to reduce to writing and send you my views as to civilizing the aborigines of our country. From a residence of thirty- six years among them and careful consideration, I know that this subject is not understood by Con-gress, nor by the officers of our Government having the power and inclination to improve their condition. The views arid actions of our Government in reference to the Indians have, from the first, been guided by men who are strongly interested pecuniarily to keep thmn savages; and hence, the large sums of money annually appropriated to improve their condition are expended with little benefit to them or ourselves. There are two grand impediments to the civilization of the Indians of our country. The first arises from their religion. Heathen Indians say, " We were not made to work as civilized men do, but for warriors and hunters, and if we should engage in agricultural or mechanical labors we would soon die. The gods we worship would speedily destroy us." Many ot our people will say this is mere pretense, only an excuse for laziness. I have seen abundant evidence that very many ( I suppose a large majority of the heathen aborigines of our country) sincerely believe it. This false idea cannot be removed by argument. It can and ought to be by instruction in Christianity, and affords a powerful argument for Christian missions among them. Our Government has no right to interfere in religious belief, and so cannot legislate against this directly, but it may in this case, as in others, indirectly weaken or destroy such erroneous belief as are sapping the foundations of civil society. The other impediment to the civilization of the red men is in security of both person and property among them. The wisest of men says, " he that laboreth.. laboreth for himself craveth it of him." You and your fellow commissioners, being working men, need not bej? told that the hope of enjoying the fruit of their labors is the grand incentive to in dustry among white men and black men ; but perhaps you are not aware that there is absolutely nothing on which a red man may hang such a hope. His gun or bow may be broken, his horse killed or violently taken away, or his tent cut to pieces, or cabin burned over his head, or himself, wife and children murdered in broad daylight, in the presence of hundreds of competent witnesses, and he can have no redress whatever. It is not, and never was thought, to be, any part of the business of Indian chiefs or braves to punish thieves, robbers, or murderers. Judges of the United States courts, when such cases have been brought before them, have decided they have no right to interfere where one Indian has injured another. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate, ( Patterson,) in a long and very able report, printed by authority of the last Congress, shows very clearly that the Indians never have been subjected to our laws, and endeavors to show that they ought not to be. To prove the latter, he uses the arguments always used by men who are inter-ested in keeping them savages, and doubtless sincerely believes it an inmst interference with their rights and injurious to them. But in this he is mistaken as might be clearly proven. The Indians have suffered much from injuries inflicted by white men, but more than ten times as much from injuries inflicted by each other. Our Government has wronged them when, through fraud or terror, they have got them to assent to treaties which they justly believed to be injurious to their own people, and then, by the appointment of incompetent and unprincipled agents, defrauding them of a large part of what was promised them for their hunting- grounds ; but the greatest injury of our Government to them is keeping them in circumstances in which it is impossible for them to provide for themselves. This is the con-dition of all heathen Indians who have sold their hunting- grounds, and it must continue to be so till they are subjected to our laws. It is also, to a great extent, the case with those who have embraced Christianity. Such labor in cultivating the earth to some extent, but not with that steady industry which they would evince if they had the same assurance of getting the fruit of their labors which white men have. Many will tell you that the Indians are unwilling to be subjected to our laws, and that any attempt to so subject them would bring on war with them. This is false. The Dakotas, when they sold their hunting- grounds in Minnesota, sold the best part of the State, stipulated expressly that they should have protection of persons and property like civilized men, and if our Government had, in accordance with this provision of the treaty, punished the heathen Dakotas who robbed and murdered their own people for working like civilized men, those heathen Sioux would not have, in J86' 2, massacred several hundred whites, and brought untold miseries on themselves and people, and caused our Government to expend many millions of dollars in fighting them. In the British possessions to the north of us the Indians are all held subject to the com-mon law of England, and there has not been an Indian war for nearly a century. The hos-tility between the white and red men of our country is chiefly owing to the fact that the lat-ter are, in our country, everywhere outlaws. If we would strike from our statutes the |