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Show 1 REPORT OF SUPERINTENDENT OF INDIAN SCHOOLS. 347 I I I no longer be a secluded part of our population; they should be made useful and acknowledged members of our society. In our efforts to humanize, Christianize, and educate the Indian we I should endeaver to divorce him from his primitive habits and customs. He should be induced to emulate the white man in all things that con-duce to his happiness and comfort. The best way to instruct an Indian in agriculture is to locate his land or farm in juxtapositio~lw ith that of thrifty and energetic farmers. If his reservation contained a few families of Pennsylvania's thfifty farmers, found among the Quakers or Germans, his soul would be fired with anew ambition heretofore foreign to hisnature; his former habits and customs would yield and become subordinate to this better existence; his children would adopt the habits and customs of his more fortunate neighbors, and thus the work of civilization would receive a healthy impetus. The desire for learning, the ambition to obtain an education naturally follows the van of prosperity. An uneducated man is sensitively embarrassed when associated with those who enjoy the culture of education and refinement. The schools, therefore, when the elemen-tary principles are inculcated, furnish the inspiration and incentive for a higher ainbition in this direction. In connection with the subjects herein discussed, Maj. R. H. Pratt, superintendent of the Indian school at Carlisle, Pa., says: While it is next to impossible to inculcate the American spirit by theoretical teaohing on the reservations, where there are no illustrations of it in the life in thase isolated places, it is alsoimpractical to teach it in purely Indian schoolsaway ! from the reservation, even when surrounded by the best examples of an active, 1 indnstrions district. The Indian children must in some way be placed under the influence of individual contact with American life and citizenship. The location of every nonreservation school should therefore be where the example in the sur-rounding country in the best; hut precept must be followed by practice. Hence the necessity of this outing aystemor something akin toit: and then should follow continuous enlargement and extension until all purely Indian schools disappear. The Indians, in their savage and unlet,tered condition, possessed an inherent conception of a Creator. They would invoke the help and assistance of the "Great Father" upon all occasions illvolving the peace, happiness, and success of the tribe. They were fully impressed with the fact that the mountains, the rivers, the hirds, and the flow-ers were thecreation of a wonderful being who lived beyond the clouds, and whose home was lighted by the sun by day and by the moon and beautiful stars by night, and that his pleasure or his wrath was visited upon good or bad Indiaus at will; therefore, in their rude way, they offered him homage and invoked his blessing upon any important undertaking. Differing fromotherheathen or savage tribes, t,hey were neverwholly devoted to the worship of idols. They seemed to have a vague and undefined idea of the existence of a Supreme Being. Therefore the conclusion is reasonable that their idea of a divinity was upon a more advanced plane than that of some other races. Does not this afford anencouraging hope that the normal attitude of their minds toward religious truth is receptive and that they may easily be taught theethics of Christianity? They already have a fine sense of right and wrong, and have often manifested forbearance-oueof the Christian virtues--under cruel and provoking oppression. The consensus of information upoil the subject induces the belief that wit,h education a better moral and physical condition for the Indian must inevitably result. Mental and moral training, as given A i |