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Oahe School, Dakota
By Miss Julia E. Pratt.
A very sad incident came into our life as a
school last winter, which has accentuated
anew the ignorance and the superstitious
heathenism of these Indian people.
One of our little boys was sent to the
dormitory one morning to do some work to
which he objected, and, while pretending to
obey, he took one of the other little boys
with him and ran away. Their absence was not
discovered until it was too late to overtake
them, and as their home was only ten miles
away, and we knew they were good walkers, as
all Indians are almost from babyhood, we had
every reason to believe they would reach
home in safety. They had started before
daylight, and without any breakfast, and the
little boy who was enticed away had no
overcoat nor mittens, but had gone on the
impulse of the moment without taking any
extra clothing. About ten o'clock, it grew
very cold, and as the little fellow had on
shoes, to which he was unaccustomed, his
feet became so cold and tired that he could
not go on. Then the boy who had coaxed him
away gave him his overcoat and mittens and
went on, reaching home about noon, telling
that he had run away, and that he had left
Jaran about half way. Jaran's father did not
believe the story, and came back to us, ten
miles, to see if it were true. This made us
very anxious, but nothing could be done but
to await the issue. It seemed as if a series
of unfortunate mistakes had combined to
bring about this result; and to make
everything still more puzzling, Mr. Riggs,
our superintendent, was away. He reached
home that evening, and the next morning sent
the steward to learn the fate of the little
runaway. He went on until he found the
little boy's cap and mittens, and the place
where he had evidently lain all night. It
was a bitter night, and we knew that he
could not possibly have survived, in his
exhausted condition, and not knowing how to
protect himself, even if he had had the
means for so doing. This, in itself, was a
very bitter experience for us, but the worst
was yet to come. Mr. Riggs found it
impossible to get an Indian to go to the
assistance of these poor people. They were
all afraid. Rumors were afloat that the
father was going to shoot anyone connected
in any way with the school, Indian or white.
When an Indian is sorrow-stricken over the
death of a friend or relative, he alleviates
his suffering by killing some one else.
After the little boy was buried, the family
came to the school. The old grandmother
brought the clothes he had on when found—and
which they had cut off,—spread them out
before Mr. Riggs, and reproached him for
sending a little boy out into a storm so
insufficiently clad; to which Mr. Riggs
replied that we had no idea he was going out
into the storm, that he was dressed for the
house, and had we known he was going on a
journey, he would have been dressed for it.
She would not be pacified, however, and
after bitterly reproaching Mr. Riggs for the
death of her grandson, she demanded pay for
it, as if money would make up to them his
loss.
That afternoon, at the woman's meeting, we
learned that they had given away everything
they possessed, furniture, clothing,
bedding, dishes, and were absolutely
destitute of the barest necessities of life.
This is one of their customs. They reason
thus: Our child is dead; our hearts are sad;
life has no longer any attractions; take all
we have. The Christian Indian women in our
church each gave something out of her little
property to help these poor heathen people,
who in their superstitious ignorance had
made their lot so wretched. Taking this,
they returned home and demanded of the
family of the other poor boy a cow in
payment for the death of their child.
And there came to me this question: Is it
possible that in the midst of this beautiful
free land of ours, there lives a people so
densely ignorant, so darkly superstitious,
sunk so low in heathenism, as this incident
shows? And this is only one of many such
incidents. May God help us when such things
are possible in a Christian land.
Letter
from an Indian Boy
June 5th, 1889.
Friends at the East:
It is summer over here now and every thing
looks green and nice. The roses are red and
beautiful, so every day everybody has a
bouquet on his coat. There are lots of more
flowers, some of them are white, blue, red,
yellow; so everything looks nice.
The girls always decorate the church on
Sunday. They get lots of flowers on the
hills and down in the bottom. The days have
been nice for about two weeks. The sun
shines every day, and the wind has not blown
for a long time, but to-day the wind blows
just a little but not much.
We always play ball, and have nice times
playing. But some times we get hurt. The
Perkins Hall boys always play ball with the
Whitney Hall boys, but the Whitney boys
always get beaten.
Everybody on the Reservation has ploughed
his field and planted corn, potatoes,
onions, squashes, beets, turnips, wheat,
oats, flax, beans and melons, so everything
is just coming out, and after a while they
will grow big and good to eat.
Mr. Lawson went away in May, and the boys
had to work up there alone. They worked all
right, and when he came back he found that
all papers were ready to be printed. He came
back with some galley-holders and some
cases. After he had been back about two
weeks, another machine came; it is the paper
cutter. It is a nice machine for the
printing office. Seven boys work in the
morning and six in the afternoon, so we are
getting along first rate.
We always go after tipsina on the hills;
some of the people call them wild turnips.
They are very good to eat. If you don't know
them, you lose something in your life. You
don't know how they taste unless you have
eaten some. They have dark-blue flowers on
them which stand about four or five inches
from the ground. They are easy to find out,
and when we find them, we have to dig them.
When we come back, we always get so tired
that we lay down under the trees.
Your friend, JOHN BROWN
Indian
Contract
Schools
The public has been made
aware through the press recently that the
United States Government aids the Roman
Catholics to support 2,098 Indian pupils and
assists all Protestant denominations in the
support of only 1,146 pupils. Why is this
discrimination, and who is to blame for it?
If the Roman Catholics give for plant,
teachers' salaries, etc., an amount
proportionately greater than that given by
the Protestants, then the Protestants have
themselves only to blame, and the difficulty
can be remedied by their giving an equal
amount. But if, on the other hand, the
Government gives in proportion more to the
Roman Catholics than it does to the
Protestants, then the Government is showing
a wholly unjustifiable partiality. Figures
are in order on this subject. Who will
furnish them?
White Men
and Red Men.
"The Round Up! Interesting High
School Commencement Exercises Last Night."
The above was the
characteristic heading in a Dakota paper of
an editorial notice of the closing exercises
of their High School. Everything takes its
color from the peculiar condition of
society. A rubber overcoat is a "slicker,"
and a native pony is a "broncho." Not so
inappropriate, either, is the term "The
Round Up," for the closing exercises of a
school year. It ought to be the round up, a
complete circle or sphere of successful work
and accomplishment, so far as that period of
school-life is concerned. The white men of
Dakota are changing perceptibly, I think, in
their feelings toward the red men among
them, or among whom they are. A sense of
responsibility for their Christianization
seems to have taken possession of the minds
of the intelligent Christian people. One is
impressed with the abundance of church
buildings in these small white settlements.
In one small village of perhaps five hundred
people, I counted eight Protestant churches.
With Christian churches so numerously
planted as they are in these new Western
States, we may hope for large help from them
in the Indian work of the Association,
before many years. They are now falling into
line in this great work. I rode on one side
of the Missouri River for many miles among
the white settlements. Afterwards I rode on
the other side of the river a long distance
among the Indian villages, and could not
help but contrast the condition of life of
the two. The Government relations differ
materially. If the supplies were withheld
from the Indians, and they were compelled to
take land in severally, and not hustled over
the prairie every month or two weeks for
meat, sugar and coffee, I think the change
for the better would be perceptible in a
twelvemonth. There is general hopefulness on
the part of the missionaries among the red
men, now that two Christian men stand at the
head of the Indian Department.
It was my privilege to take a cordial letter
of greeting from Supt. Dorchester of the
Government Indian Schools to the A.M.A.
missionaries at Santee Agency, Neb. It was
an encouragement to these earnest toilers in
this far-away field to know that there was
appreciation on the part of the Government
of the Christian work among these Indians.
Great care, intense study, great
deliberation of action will be necessary if
these new Government officers succeed in
bettering the condition of the red men, as
they are doubtless sincerely desirous of
doing. They must know what they are doing,
before they do it.
The Government schools which I visited
furnished abundant evidence that
considerable time would be necessary to
correct the evils existing in these, and to
make them what they should be before any
radical policy could be safely adopted by
the Government in reference to contract
missionary schools. The Roman Catholic
influence seems to have been a dominant
power in the control of these schools for
some time.
Wolf Chief, a Mandan Indian, called on me
while at Fort Berthold and begged that his
tribe be protected against a Catholic priest
who, he said, wanted to compel them to send
their children to a school that he proposed
to establish near them. "We Mandans are
Congregationalists," said this Indian chief,
"and we want to send our children to your
mission."
Amusing
Incidents
Incidents both amusing and
pathetic are of frequent occurrence in this
Indian work. Such incidents throw light upon
the inside life of the Indians and
missionaries, and are often useful in the
"Monthly Concert," and so I record some of
them here.
"Cherries-in-the-mouth,"
a somewhat aged and highly-painted Indian,
was very much taken with one of the
missionaries. He came to the Superintendent
of the mission and offered eight ponies for
her, or, I believe, more correctly, said he
would give eight ponies, if he had them. His
affection was larger than his pocket-book,
as is sometimes true of his pale-faced
brother.
"Plenty Corn" was a sweet
little Indian girl, who attended the mission
at Fort Berthold. She had won her way
wonderfully into the hearts of the teachers,
and when she died last spring, there were
sorrowful hearts in the mission, as truly as
in the Indian tepee. The parents had been
reached also by the influence of the
mission. They permitted the missionary to
lay the body in a coffin. The Indians took
up the little white casket and bore it to
the boat in which it was to be taken across
the Missouri River. The father rowed the
boat, as the mother sat on the opposite bank
waiting for her dead darling, and from the
boat there went up the piteous wailing of
the father, which was echoed back from the
bank in the piteous wail of the mother. It
was a sad, sad sight, and emphasized
painfully the need of Christian instruction,
that the hope of the Gospel may break
through the superstitious darkness of these
sad lives.
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American Missionary Association, 1888-1895
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