The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889Various
Religion
The American Missionary — Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889
Various
Congregational churches -- Missions -- Periodicals; Home missions -- Periodicals
There is another influence of which I would speak, the influence of the
home. Here in our happy homes we know but very little of what that means
to the Indian. An Indian has no home, in our sense of the word. Some
years ago I went with a party of Indians 175 miles west of the Missouri
River in the middle of winter. We climbed a mountain and looked away to
the east. We could see, I should think, 150 miles, and the Indian as he
sat there on the edge of a rock, covered his head up in a blanket and
cried. Said he: "This is my country, and we have had to leave it." That
was his idea of home--such a barren stretch as that, the snow glistening
in the sunlight. The Dakota Indian lives in a region, not in a place.
The Christian home coming into the midst of a village carries there an
ideal of which the Indian knows nothing, and he is taught by the power
of example day after day. The Christian woman in that home keeps her
house clean, keeps her children clean, and stands there as a persistent
example of the power of the gospel of soap, just as the man himself
there who has become a Christian no longer steals horses. A party going
out into an enemy's country would go as often for the sake of bringing
back stolen horses, as they would for scalps. The man who has become a
Christian is recognized at once as shut out from that privilege.
Reference has been made to the opening up of the reservation, and the
crisis is now upon us in connection with our Indian work. We have eleven
million acres of land there just west of the Missouri River to be thrown
open for settlement. Do you know what that means? Were any of you down
at Oklahoma this last season? It means the rush of a swarm of people,
good, bad and indifferent--chiefly bad and indifferent--and these
settlers will crowd themselves in as a wedge between the two divisions
of the Indian reservation, and we shall have Indians both to the north
and to the south. They will be exposed to influences from which they
have been kept as yet; influences which will tend to uplift in the
outcome, as well as to degrade. I thank God for it. I thank God that he
is bringing the white man into the midst of the Indian country. It may
seem that this is a heroic remedy. So it is, but it is time for heroic
remedies. We need to meet the question as it comes to us to-day. There
is a ranchman out on Bad River, who tells me that there is no such thing
as an Indian question. "Why," said I, "what are you talking about?"
"There is no such thing," said he. I asked him how he explained it. "The
simple thing to do is just to treat them as men, and that will be all
there is to it. That will settle it, and there will be no such thing as
an Indian question." Treat them as men and make Christians of them, and
we will settle the whole thing.
* * * * *
ADDRESS OF REV. HENRY A. STIMSON, D.D.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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