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Show I 120 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. from paying any tribute toward maintaining the civic machinery; on the manner in which intrusions upon their lands had been .met by their great patron, the intruders driven off, and every possible Bssist-ance given them to hold their own against further aggresGon. And in conclusion I put the quqstion fairly to him: What would happen to the Oraibis if this powerful friend of theirs should become disgusted . with their contemptuous and inimical demonstrations, close' out its interests in the school and the agency, turn its back upon them, and leave them to their fate? With a sneer the chief responded that such talk was all nonsense; that he had heard it many times before, but nothing came of it; that his people did not wish anything to do with the whites; that their fathers had warned them not to let their children go to school and learn white ways; that he intended to follow the advice of the fathers rather than of Washington, and that if his people got into any trouble they would be rescued by their " white brother who lives in the far east where the sun rises"-Montezuma. No logic or satire that I could summon to my assistance availed to shake his faith or the faith of the people behind him in the Montezuma myth and their assur-ance of the second coming of thei= Messiah whenever they needed him. Even when I reminded the old man that his people had no means of notifying Montezuma of their distress, he answered with sublime complaisance: " Washington will tell him ! " Of course it is useless to try to reason with anyone so absolutely bound up in superstitious ignorance as t o argue thus i n a vicious circle. It is with the purpose of emphasizing the hopelessness of attempting to meet such a situation with moral forces alone that I have given this brief review of the talk at the council. I took pains, however, to impress upon all the Indians whom I met on my .*isit to Oraibi that the Government intended that their children should have the opportunity to learn the simple lessons taught at the little day , school, and that even their parents had no right to deprive the yoyoung. people of what was a practical necessity of their lives now that they must, willy nilly, come into contact with white people. I explained that I had no purpose of forcing the higher branches of learning upon any of the Indians against their will, but that, as surely as the sun rose, just so surely would I compel, by all the means at my dir-posal, a recognition of the needs of the children and of their right to . their a b c's and enough knowledge of numbers' to enable them to tal~ec are of themselves in an ordinary trade. I told them that this . . was precisely what was required of the white people; that the. laws past by the Great Council at Washington, called the Congress, clothed me with authority to make rules of a similar sort for the Indians; and that I intended to carry out this law at any cost, not only because it was law, but because it was right and the only fair thing for the chil- |