OCR Text |
Show 22 REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF I N D ~ N AFFAIRS. To plant our schools among the Indians means to bring the older mem-bers of the race within the sphere of influence of which every school is a center. This certainly must be the basis of any practical effort 'to uplift a whole people. For its demonstration we do not have to look beyond the border line of our experience with Caucasian com-munities, where it is obvious that the effect upon the character as well as the intelligence of any neighborhood of having abundant school facilities close at hand is. by no means confined to the generation actually under the teachers' daily care. I Though the day-school system is the ideal mechanism for the uplifting of the Indians, we can not yet wholly dispense with board-mg schools, because so many tribec;';ill continue the nomadic or semi-nomadic habits which would require the continual moving of the day schools from place to place in order to keep near a sufficient number of families for their support. In other cases a tribe which has had its lands allotted to its members individually has become so scattered. over a large area that the distances the pupils would have to come and go would be prohibitive of their regular daily attendance at any school or schools, no matter how carefully located with regard to theconvenience of the greatest number of possible patrons. In such instances the difficulties of the situation are reduced to a minimum by a resort to the reservation boarding school, where the children are within easy enough reach of their parents to enable the latter to see them at rathe? frequent intervals. ~ I But boarding schools, conducted on the basis on which the Govern, ment conducts those established for the benefit of the Indians. are an anomaly in our American scheme of popular instruction. They , furnish gratuitously not only tuition-the prime object of their existence-but. food, clothing, and permanent shelter during the whole period of a pupil's attendance. In plain. English, they are simply educational. almshouses, with the unfortunate feature, from the point of view of our ostensible purpose of cultivating a spirit of independence in the' Indians, @at the charitable phase,is obtrusively pushed forward as an attraction instead of wearing the stamp which makes the almshouse wholesomely repugnant to Caucasian sentiment. I This tends steadily to foster in the Indian an ignoble willingness to accept unearned privileges; nay, more, from learning to accept them he presently comes, by a perfectly natural evolutionary process, to demand them as rights and to heap demand upon demand. The result is that in certain parts of the West the only conception his white neighbors entertain of an Indian is that of a beggar as aggres-sive as he is shameless. Was ever a worse wrong perpetrated upon a weaker by a stronger race? If so, history has failed to record it. Scores of books have been written within the last generation assailing our white civiliza- |