OCR Text |
Show COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFURS. 5 cultural pursuits, and especially where the boys could be educated as farmers, and the girls in housewifery and the dairy; and where also there could be imparted to both the rudiments of a plain and useful education. Mechanics' shops should also be established where neces-sary, and where as many of the boys as possible should be placed and trained to a knowledge of the mechanic arts suited to the condition and wants of their people. It is, if possible, more important that the Indian should be taught to till the soil, and to labor in the me-chanical shops, than to have even a common school education. The adult Indians should be encouraged to cultivate the lands as-signed to them, each to have the exclusive control, under the tribal right of his own possessions, and of the products of his own labor; and to encourage them to part with their children willingly to be instructed at the manual labor schools and in the mechanical shops, the surplus prodnotions of the one or profits of the other should be divided among the parents of the children who aided to produce them. A11 these arrangements should be under the exclusive control of the department, as well as the annuities, so far as they can be withdrawn from that of the tribe, and applied to accomplish the objects mentioned. No white person should be permitted to obtain any kind of possession or foothold within the limits of the reservations, nor even to enter them, except in the employ or by permission of the government, and none should he employed except such as would be actually necessary for the instruction of the Indians. Power should be conferred on the agents to eject summarily all intruders from the reservations. They should also be clothed with executive and judicial authority in mat-ters pertaining to their agencies, and appeals from their decision be allowed to the superintendents, and thence to the department. But to carry out the system successfully, it would be necessary to relieve the Indians from the example of the worthless idlers and vagrants of the tribe, as well as those whose wild habits and roving dispositions would preclude them from settlir~g dowu quietly and orderly. A11 such should be colonized by themselves in such positions as not to admit of much, if any, communication or intercourse with the settled portions of their tribes. For such colonies, places could be found somewhere about Bent's Fort and the heads of the Arkansas and Platte rivers. This plan is applicable at present only to such Indians as those lo-cated in Nebraska and Kansas. The wilder tribes could not be brought at once within the entire system, as they could not at first brook the restraint and confinement. They must undergo a preliminary train-ing, being gradually induced to abandon their nomadic and wander-ing habits and to settle dowu on larger reservations, where for a time they would have to be sustained until they could be influenced to make the necessary exertions to support themselves by cultivating the soil. The settlement of the questions arising under various treaties in which reservations have been granted in severalty to Indians in Kansas and Nebraska presents many difficulties which I know of no way of overcoming, except by Congress authorizing the department to sell the lands and to control the proceeds thereof in such manner as to render them effective for the assistance and benefit of the reservees. |