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Show REPORT OF COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. 23 it is not only cruelty to that child to shut it up where it shall breathe tbe inclosed ntmosphei'e, but it is a menace to the other children with whom it is brought thus into close and unmholesome contact. It is too soon yet to predict the success or failure of this experiment, but the cost of giving it a trial is too insignificant for consideration h comparison with the great gain to be achieved if it does succeed. In one-or two places I have discovered a disposition on the part of the Indians to pay some of the expenses of establishing a day school among them if the office will meet the rest; this tendency I am doing nll I can to encourage. A number of parents on the Blackfeet Reservation have offered, if I would supply the lumber, to build a schoolhouse for their children themselves, and have asked whether I would consent to run the school during the spring, summer and / fall continuously, but have the annual vacation in the most inclement part of the winter. As this is a plan which I have long wished to try in those northern regions where the winter is apt to be too severe to permit of little children's traveling daily 4 or 5 miles to school without danger to their health, I very gladly consented, and by the outcome of this experiment we can be guided as to extending the practice of winter vacations to other points in the North*est. One more plan I have in view in respect of the day schools, if I can find the right teachers to put in charge of its execution. I refer to a "portable school." In some parts of the Indian country the tribes are still nomads within certain limits. They no longer follow the game animals about with their camps, but they do move their flocks and herds from a summer to a winter range and back again. This means that, much as we should like to furnish them with day-school facilities, and much as some of the Indians would appreciate these, we are faced with the problem of maintaining two or three in different places to meet the needs of one group of patrons. If me could find a few teachers whose enthusiasm for their work, compara-tive disregard for their personal comfort, and sympithy with the general idea were sufficiently marked to insure thorough test condi-tions, I should like to make an experiment of buying i few portable houses and .transporting them, with their necessary fnrnitiire and utensils, the teachers and their household goods, from point to point hs the Indians might change their local habitations. The pl~ul neems to me worth a fair trial, atany rate. . FIGFITING THE WHITE PLAGUE. Great popular interest in the general subject of tuberculosis bas been aroused by the Internntional Congress which convened in Wash-ington on September 21, 1908. Discussion of tuberculosis among the Indians was divided between two papers read before the congress. The Indian Office also, in cooperation with the Smithsoninn Inqtitu-- |
