“Harjo, you must have only one wife when you come into our church. Can’t you give up one of these women?” Miss Evans glanced at the two, sitting by with smiles of polite interest on their faces, understanding nothing. They had not shared Harjo’s enthusiasm either for the white man’s God or his language.
“Give up my wife?” A sly smile stole over his face. He leaned closer to Miss Evans. “You tell me, my friend, which one I give up.” He glanced from ’Liza to Jennie as if to weigh their attractions, and the two rewarded him with their pleasantest smiles. “You tell me which one,” he urged.
“Why, Harjo, how can I tell you!” Miss Evans had little sense of humor; she had taken the old man seriously.
“Then,” Harjo sighed, continuing the comedy, for surely the missionary was jesting with him, “’Liza and Jennie must say.” He talked to the Indian women for a time, and they laughed heartily. ’Liza, pointing to the other, shook her head. At length Harjo explained, “My friend, they cannot say. Jennie, she would run a race to see which one stay, but Liza, she say no, she is fat and cannot run.”
Miss Evans comprehended at last. She flushed angrily, and protested, “Harjo, you are making a mock of a sacred subject; I cannot allow you to talk like this.”
“But did you not speak in fun, my friend ?” Harjo queried, sobering. “Surely you have just said what your friend, the white woman at the mission (he meant Mrs. Rowell) would say, and you do not mean what you say.”
“Yes, Harjo, I mean it. It is true that Mrs. Rowell raised the point first, but I agree with her. The church cannot be defiled by receiving a bigamist into its membership.” Harjo saw that the young woman was serious, distressingly serious. He was silent for a long time, but at last he raised his head and spoke quietly, “It is not good to talk like that if it is not in fun.”
He rose and went to the stable. As he led Miss Evans’ horse up to the block it was champing a mouthful of corn, the last of a generous portion that Harjo had put before it. The Indian held the bridle and waited for Miss Evans to mount. She was embarrassed, humiliated, angry. It was absurd to be dismissed in this way by—“by an ignorant old bigamist!” Then the humor of it burst upon her, and its human aspect. In her anxiety concerning the spiritual welfare of the sinner Harjo, she had insulted the man Harjo. She began to understand why Mrs. Rowell had said that the old Indians were hopeless.
“Harjo,” she begged, coming out of the passageway, “please forgive me. I do not want you to give up one of your wives. Just tell me why you took them.”
“I will tell you that, my friend.” The old Creek looped the reins over his arm and sat down on the block. “For thirty years Jennie has lived with me as my wife. She is of the Bear people, and she came to me when I was thirty-five and she was twenty-five. She could not come before, for her mother was old, very old, and Jennie, she stay with her and feed her.
“So, when I was thirty years old I took ’Liza for my woman. She is of the Crow people. She help me make this little farm here when there was no farm for many miles around.
“Well, five years ’Liza and me, we live here and work hard. But there was no child. Then the old mother of Jennie she died, and Jennie got no family left in this part of the country. So ’Liza say to me, ‘Why don’t you take Jennie in here?’ I say, ‘You don’t care?’ and she say, ‘No, maybe we have children here then.’ But we have no children—never have children. We do not like that, but God He would not let it be. So, we have lived here thirty years very happy. Only just now you make me sad.”
“Harjo,” cried Miss Evans, “forget what I said. Forget that you wanted to join the church.” For a young mission worker with a single purpose always before her, Miss Evans was saying a strange thing. Yet she couldn’t help saying it; all of her zeal seemed to have been dissipated by a simple statement of the old man.
“I cannot forget to love Jesus, and I want to be saved,” Old Harjo spoke with solemn earnestness. The situation was distracting. On one side stood a convert eager for the protection of the church, asking only that he be allowed to fulfill the obligations of humanity and on the other stood the church, represented by Mrs. Rowell, that set an impossible condition on receiving old Harjo to itself. Miss Evans wanted to cry; prayer, she felt, would be entirely inadequate as a means of expression.
“Oh! Harjo,” she cried out, “I don’t know what to do. I must think it over and talk with Mrs. Rowell again.”
But Mrs. Rowell could suggest no way out; Miss Evans’ talk with her only gave the older woman another opportunity to preach the folly of wasting time on the old and “unreasonable” Indians. Certainly the church could not listen even to a hint of a compromise in this case. If Harjo wanted to be saved there was one way and only one—unless—
“Is either of the two women old? I mean, so old that she is—an—”
“Not at all,” answered Miss Evans. “They’re both strong and—yes, happy. I think they will outlive Harjo.”
“Can’t you appeal to one of the women to go away? I dare say we could provide for her.” Miss Evans, incongruously, remembered Jennie’s jesting proposal to race for the right to stay with Harjo. What could the mission provide as a substitute for the little home that ’Liza had helped to create there in the edge of the woods? What other home would satisfy Jennie?
“Mrs. Rowell, are you sure that we ought to try to take one of Harjo’s women from him? I’m not sure that it would in the least advance morality amongst the tribe, but I’m certain that it would make three gentle people unhappy for the rest of their lives.”
“You may be right, Miss Evans.” Mrs. Rowell was not seeking to create unhappiness, for enough of it inevitably came to be pictured in the little mission building. “You may be right,” she repeated, “but it is a grievous misfortune that old Harjo should wish to unite with the church.”
No one was more regular in his attendance at the mission meetings than old Harjo. Sitting well forward, he was always in plain view of Miss Evans at the organ. Before the service began, and after it was over, the old man greeted the young woman. There was never a spoken question, but in the Creek’s eyes was always a mute inquiry. Once Miss Evans ventured to write to her old pastor in New York, and explain her trouble. This was what he wrote in reply: “I am surprised that you are troubled, for I should have expected you to rejoice, as I do, over this new and wonderful evidence of the Lord’s reforming power. Though the church cannot receive the old man so long as he is confessedly a bigamist and violator of his country’s just laws, you should be greatly strengthened in your work through bringing him to desire salvation.”
“Oh! It’s easy to talk when you’re free from responsibility!” cried out Miss Evans. “But I woke him up to a desire for this water of salvation that he cannot take. I have seen Harjo’s home, and I know how cruel and useless it would be to urge him to give up what he loves—for he does love those two women who have spent half their lives and more with him. What, what can be done?”
Month after month, as old Harjo continued to occupy his seat in the mission meetings, with that mute appeal in his eyes and a persistent light of hope on his face, Miss Evans repeated the question, “What can be done?” If she was sometimes tempted to say to the old man, “Stop worrying about your soul; you’ll get to Heaven as surely as any of us,” there was always Mrs. Rowell to remind her that she was not a Mormon missionary. She could not run away from her perplexity. If she should secure a transfer to another station, she felt that Harjo would give up coming to the meetings, and in his despair become a positive influence for evil amongst his people. Mrs. Rowell would not waste her energy on an obstinate old man. No, Harjo was her creation, her impossible convert, and throughout the years, until death—the great solvent which is not always a solvent—came to one of them, would continue to haunt her.
And meanwhile, what?6
The Indian in the Professions, 1912
My business, or profession, is writing and editing. In my small way, I’ve tried to make myself an inte
rpreter of the world, of the modern, progressive Indian. The greatest handicap I have is my enthusiasm. I know a lot of Indians who are making good; I know how sturdily they have set their faces toward the top of the hill, and how they’ve tramped on when the temptation to step aside and rest was strongest. When I try to write about them I lose my critical sense. Then the editors sympathize—“Too bad he’s got that Indian bug”—and ask me about the cowboys. Now, I’ll write fiction about cowboys, make ’em yip-yap and shoot their forty-fours till everybody’s deaf, but I will not repeat the old lies about the Indian for any editor that ever paid on acceptance!
“Most of the Indians that go through Carlisle really do go back to the blanket, don’t they?” It was an assertion rather than a question, and a modern magazine editor made it to me not a year ago.
“You’re wrong,” I said. “I can send you accurate statistics compiled by Mr. Friedman, superintendent of the school, which show exactly what has become of the Carlisle graduates. They go back to useful, serviceable lives. They plow and trade, become soldiers and mechanics, enter the professions—teaching, nursing, the law, the diplomatic service, the ministry, medicine, politics, dentistry, veterinary surgery, writing, painting, acting. If you want me to do it, I’ll assemble a gallery of individual Indians who are getting to the top of their professions in a friendly, honorable competition with 90 million white Americans that will fill half of your magazine.”
Did he want me to do it? Not he! Better for him one Indian who had slumped than a hundred who had pushed ahead. If only Congressman Carter or Senator Curtis would go back to the tepee and the blanket!7 That would be a story worth telling!
Let us develop this profession of reformer; let us develop self-confidence—make ourselves effective, sane, and scientific. Cut out mere complaining, and develop the lawyer’s habit of investigation and clear arrangement of facts.
Last Spring, at Carlisle, I heard a Siceni Nori, a graduate of the school of 1894, talk to the graduating class of 1911. Mr. Nori is, I believe, a Pueblo Indian, and is a teacher at Carlisle. I should like to quote all of that good speech to you, changing it here and there to make it fit you. The gist of one paragraph I cannot resist using. It is one in which Mr. Nori ran over a list of Carlisle graduates who are making good in business and the professions:
“If it shall be the pleasure of any one here to take a trip to Cuba and it becomes necessary to have the assistance of a dentist, just look up Dr. James E. Johnson, who is enjoying an annual income of $4,000, and his wife, also a graduate, employed by the government at a salary of $1,200 per annum; or, if you desire to take the water trip, take the Pennsylvania Limited and go to Tiffin, Ohio, where you will find Dr. Caleb Sickles, another graduate and a prominent dentist who is equally successful; then, if you have time, go to Oneida, Wisconsin, where you will find Dr. Powlas, a prominent physician who has the largest practice at his home at DePere, Wis., and is a real leader and missionary among his people. Then proceed to Minnesota and find Carlisle graduates practicing law and other professions in the persons of Thomas Mani, Edward Rogers, and Dr. Oscar Davis. Or, if you took the southern way you would find along the Santa Fe route, Carlisle graduates and ex-students working in the various railroad shops and taking care of sections of that great railroad system, preferred above all other kinds of skilled labor, for they have shown their worth as good workmen. Or, you might meet Chas. A. Dagenett, a graduate, who is National Supervisor of Indian Employment, and who has by experience gained here at this school under the Outing System, been able by untiring effort, to systematize and build up what is really the Carlisle Outing System for the entire Indian Service, and for 300,000 Indians. It is not often possible to find a man who can be equally successful in everything that he attempts, but we have in a Carlisle graduate, Chas. A. Bender, the world-famous pitcher of the Philadelphia Athletics, a crack marksman and a jeweler by trade, and a past-master in all.”
Every month I get the Southern Workman, the school magazine published at Hampton. Over in the back is a department of “Indian notes,” which is inspiring reading. Here are printed bits of news of Indian graduates who are busy in the world. In one paragraph you will read that Elizabeth Bender is taking a nurse’s training at the Hahnemann Hospital in Philadelphia; in another that Eli Beardsley has gone to take a job as engineer at the Grand River School in South Dakota; in a third, that Jacob Morgan, a Navajo, is working as a missionary among his people in New Mexico.8 Month after month the list of those who graduate into the professions lengthens. And not only at Carlisle and Hampton are the professions recruiting Indian members, but Haskell and Sherman Institute, the high schools of Oklahoma and scattered colleges from Dartmouth to the University of Washington are turning them out. With me at Stanford University was an Indian named Jeffe, from Washington. Not only was he a good football player, but one of the best students we had in our law department. Another law student who came to Stanford in my time was a Cherokee named Hughes. He had previously spent two years in Dartmouth. Last fall at Muskogee, I had a good talk with a young Cherokee named Bushyhead, son of a former chief of my tribe.9 He had just come back from six months in Mexico where he went to learn Spanish. He was fitting himself for an appointment in the Diplomatic Service.
How many here know Little Bison, that thin-faced, keen-eyed Sioux who wants to colonize Nicaragua with American Indians? There’s the type of professional man who stirs the imagination! Professionally, Little Bison is a veterinary surgeon—very modestly, he told me once that there isn’t a better horse doctor in the country—but he has also been a showman, an artist’s model, a companion for an invalid man who wanted to see the ends of the earth before he died. Now he is a colonizer, a practical diplomat having business with the Estradas and the Zelayas of Central America. He comes to my mind, a figure of adventure, out of a tropical upland where the bright-plumed parrots screech. He brings the bright feathers and stories about curing a mule for a native of Nicaragua; about the fine land waiting for development, and about the power 5,000 Indian men would be down there when a revolution broke out.
To my mind Little Bison is a type of promise. He lives by his wits. And that is my definition of a professional man. Not to follow worn trails, but to be ready to break out new ones—let this be the aim of those of us who enter the professions—whatever they be.
The professions are wide open to us. We have the strength and the steadiness of will to make good in them. Prejudice against the Indian simply does not exist among the people who can make or mar a career. Always the climb for the top will be going on. The Indian who fits himself for the company of those at the top will go up. He will go as swiftly and as surely as his white brother. There is no easy, short road up—either for the Indian or for the white man. Conscientious, thorough training, character, hard work—the formula for success in the professions, is simple. I believe the average Indian would rather work his brain than his hands. That has been accounted our misfortune. I think it will be our salvation. There is room for us in the professions, there is a wide market for brains.10
Address by J. M. Oskison, 1912
My friends, I am an Indian; I was born and raised among them; but it has taken me a long time to figure out a satisfactory explanation of my interest in them. Naturally, we are not very much interested in people we are familiar with. I find this interest growing all the time. For an explanation my mind has gone back to a process of building up an ideal which went on in my youth.
I never read very much good literature when I was young—mostly the novels that you can buy for five cents and which are published in Augusta, Maine. They were not usually standard works, however full of romance and blood they might be, so it happened that I did not read Aesop’s Fables until I went to college. Doubtless, there is a craving in every child’s mind which Aesop’s Fables satisfies. I did not find them, so I built up a sort of symbolism of my own to take their place.
I remember when I was quite small the family acquired a gray mule about 15½ hands high. He
was a solid, square-rigged type of mule. I grew up alongside that mule, and had a lot to do with him personally. At first, I thought he was about the meanest and laziest and orneriest mule I ever heard of. Every time I turned away or dropped the whip, that mule would slow down. It happened that it was I usually who had to make him hustle; one day I would be driving him to the plow, the next day I would be driving him to town for something. Later on, the family acquired some cattle, and I was promoted to the job of cowboy. My first mount, as a matter of course, was that obstinate, lazy gray mule. For a long time I felt that Heaven for me would be to get rid of that mule forever. No such luck. The mule flourished, and grew more vigorous with age.
After awhile, I began to ask myself what there was about this mule that was enduring; what it was that was turning my impatience into genuine liking. It seemed to me that he grew more desirable; a little more of a friend; and it came to a point when I would rather have that gray mule assigned to me than any other animal on the ranch. When I grew older, about 16 or 17, the mule about the same age, I found that he had survived a great many of the horses we had acquired at the same time we bought him. I don’t know whether that mule is dead yet. When I left the ranch, and went to college, he was still a pretty good mule, still going strong.
Very slowly, as I have battered away at the world with my pen, an Aesop’s Fable of my own has been worked out in my mind. I learned that in the story of the gray mule was a moral, and it was up to me somehow to utilize that moral. Since taking my farewell of him, I have held six positions as writer and editor, each a little better than the one before. I am about to go on to number seven. There was a lesson in that plugging, enduring gray mule that I tried hard to learn. I have tried to apply it, not only to my own life, but, also, by way of explanation, to other Indians who have grown up under my eye and are doing the work of grown-ups. I have thought to myself—and this is a tribute to the Indian—we are a great deal like that gray mule. We are lazy. You have got to spur us on, but we are dependable. You know we are there.
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press Page 27