That gray mule could not outrun a pampered yearling, but he always got the yearling! The more I go about among the Indians, the more firmly convinced I am that you can depend on them. They are there. They deliver the goods in the end.
From many schools throughout the country, trained Indians have gone out to show their quality. I know a good many of them who have not been at Carlisle or any other Indian school. Indian friends of mine, too, are graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Dartmouth, Columbia, Stanford, and of other colleges, and they have always panned out. School-trained or not, it is a habit of theirs to make good. They have always justified my reading of the gray mule fable.
On behalf of the gray mule, and on behalf of these Indians from other schools and all sorts of trades, I thank you very sincerely for this opportunity to speak to you this evening.11
An Indian Animal Story, 1914
Long time ago, when any little boy among the Indians wanted to stay inside the house and watch the men play the wheel and stone game, instead of going out with his bow and arrows to the woods, the old men would call him to the door and whisper:
“Little one, if you stay to watch the gamblers, you will get a striped head like the bullfrog.” And then the little boy would ask why the bullfrog has a striped head. And this is the story which the old men would tell:
Way over in the west, beyond the place where the sun goes down, and right next door to Thunder, was the house of Untsaiyi, the greatest gambler that ever lived. People called him “Brass”—he was so hard that he never took any pity on those who came to play with him, but after he had won all the fine things they owned, he would ask them to play for their lives, and when he had won for the last time, he would kill the one who played with him.
In all the time that “Brass” lived beyond the gate of the west, only Thunder ever succeeded in winning any games from him.
Now, the bullfrog had heard about Untsaiyi a great many times, but he did not believe that “Brass” was such a fine gambler as people said he was.
Once, the bullfrog said this to the Wild Boy of the woods.
“Then,” said the Wild Boy, “you will know. And before you go, I will call on ‘Brass’ and fix up a plan. Goodbye!” And the Wild Boy ran off.
After the bullfrog had studied over what the Wild Boy had told him, he thought he would try a game with “Brass.” So, he packed up some parched corn and started out to call on Untsaiyi. No one ever came to the house of Untsaiyi who was not given a hearty welcome and asked to eat and drink with him. So, when “Brass” and the bullfrog were eating their supper together, they talked about what they would gamble for when the game began by the light of the fire.
Now, the wild boy had already been to talk with Untsaiyi, and had told him what the last wager was to be. But “Brass” put his hand under his chin as if he was studying hard about what to say, and finally spoke:
“When we get to the last wager, this is what we shall gamble for: the one who wins shall scratch some marks on the head of the one who loses.”
“All right” said the bullfrog, “and I am ready to begin.”
So, they sat down in the light of the fire and began to play the wheel and stone game. And time after time, as the wheel rolled on the stone, Untsaiyi would cry out:
“You see, I have won!” And then the bullfrog would pay the wager. After a long time the bullfrog had nothing more to bet, and then “Brass” cried out:
“This time, the winner will scratch some deep marks in the head of the loser!” And the bullfrog nodded and sent the wheel rolling.
“You have lost!” cried Untsaiyi, and he came to where the bullfrog sat and ran his fingernails deep across the head of the bullfrog. And to this day you will see the yellow stripes across his head.12
Arthur Caswell Parker (Seneca)
Arthur Caswell Parker (1881–1955) was born on the Cattaraugus Seneca Indian Reservation in New York. The family moved to a suburb of New York City in 1891. Parker graduated from a public high school in 1897. He attended Centenary Collegiate Institute and Dickinson Seminary. He also attended Harvard and the University of Rochester. After serving as ethnologist for the New York State Library in 1903–4, he worked as archaeologist for the New York State Museum until 1924. He then served as director of the Municipal Museum in Rochester until his retirement in 1946. Parker joined the Society of American Indians in 1911, serving as secretary-treasurer from 1912 to 1915 and as president from 1916 to 1918. He also served as editor of the SAI’s magazine from 1913 until Gertrude Bonnin assumed the position in 1918. Besides his editorials, he wrote several essays, reprinted here, that were published in boarding school newspapers. He also produced collections of Seneca oral stories, a biography of Ely S. Parker, a juvenile novel, and numerous anthropological writings, including the trilogy Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants (1910), The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet (1913), and The Constitution of the Five Nations (1916). (Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement, 263; Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 358–60)
Making New Americans from Old, 1911
America is the great mixing bowl of races wherein by some cosmic alchemy the great ruling race of the world is to be produced. Every racial element which is in the country today, or which is coming into the country tomorrow, is a potential element of the American race of the future. One of the first duties of a nation to itself is the insurance of its future quality. This means the Americanizing of the new elements which come to us, and it means likewise the Americanizing of the old elements. The diseases of Americanism do not constitute the healthy ideal. Graft, political corruption and money madness are disorders, not ideals.
The Aboriginal American, the Indian of our country, is destined to become an element in and of the new American race. The Indian cannot always remain an Indian. This is plainly evident. Either he must continue to suffer and to witness the degeneration of his tribe and its individuals, or he must become so imbued with the spirit of the new America that he absorb its teachings and save himself. The old America with its traditions is forever beyond his grasp. The new America with its wealth of opportunity is before him, and he must grasp it with a grip that knows no breaking.
Thus must the old American strive and attain. I say he must but left to himself he will not. Do you wonder why he will not? All races are not the same in many respects, and the aboriginal American race is not an imitative race as some are, but it is a race that loves and clings to that which itself has created. There is virtue in this. If the Indian will not grasp civilization unaided it must be brought to him. The race which supplanted the Indian in his own ancient home has its duty. This brings me back to the proposition that one of the first duties of a nation is to insure its future quality. The white American cannot afford to neglect the Indian American, for to do so would mean the injury of the future race. Realizing these facts, the government and the churches have expended time and money for the education and Christianizing of the Indian. Mighty work has been done, and one has only to review the history of the Indian schools and missions, to realize that greater Christian zeal, however, are urgent necessities.
The Indians whom I know best are the Iroquois of New York and Canada. In New York there are some 5,000 Iroquois living as a distinct people within the environments of civilization. They have outlived the conditions and necessities of barbarism, their cultural stage at the time of the discovery. They are surrounded by white people and have absorbed a large percentage of white blood. The average so-called New York Indian is in reality at least one-quarter white, and the percentage of white blood is yearly increasing, so that many nominal Indians are in reality white people. Notwithstanding, these mixed bloods are forced by the system under which they live to retain, develop, conserve, and propagate all the factors and elements that go to make up the peculiar problem that we call the Indian problem.
Strange to say, the Iroquois of New York, with all their boasted independence, are today a dependent people. This is not entirely thei
r fault, for it is the result of a combination of circumstances not entirely of their own making. Treaties and concessions on the part of the State and various churches, have led them to believe that their bridges, roads, their schools and teachers must be built and maintained by the State, and that all churches, missions and ministers must be maintained by mission boards. Because of this they feel that there must be no effort on their own part. The memory of Sullivan’s campaign still lingers, and the fraudulent treaties of the Genesee Valley and of Buffalo Creek have left their sting, and with it a feeling that no work that the white man can do will ever undo the wrongs which they suffered. Whatever may be the merits of the case, the effect has been to create a feeling of dependence. Contrast, however, the Canadian Six Nations of Iroquois who maintain their own schools, pay their teachers, build their own roads and bridges, pay a medical superintendent and support a national hospital and dispensary. Then note what efficient men and women independent action has produced. The same is true of the Canadian Six Nations’ churches. Most of them, the English Church excepted, are supported almost entirely by the Indians themselves, with a result of greater interest and better attendance. With our New York Indians, the gospel of self-help must be inculcated.
To create and foster this spirit manual training schools are needed. These schools should be equipped for both the young and for adults. Men must know how to work, and for what purpose, before they can produce efficiently. A large portion of the New York Indians are fully competent, but those who are not should be placed on proper footing. Then when a man, a boy, or a girl is trained for a position he should be helped to secure one if he is unable to find one for himself. It is sheer folly to educate our Indians as tinners, printers and wagon builders, and then send them back to the reservation where there is no call for these trades.
With the means of reform just indicated, the churches would find it far easier to spread the higher Christian ideal of self, of home, and of ethical living. The influences, which now tend most to destroy, are the drink curse, and the lure of the Indian show. With higher ideals developed these things would lose their charm.1
Progress for the Indian, 1912
In almost any conference of importance in which race progress is being discussed the most ordinary observer will discover that the Indian has two radically distinct classes of earnest champions. Each of these classes, though they differ widely as to what the Indian should be, is laboring to secure what it believes to be his best interests.
The first division consists of those who find so much to admire in the Indian as he was that they desire him to always remain substantially as he was. The romance of his life and history, his essentially religious nature, his interesting social organization, his mode of life in the open, his distinctive arts, and his intense love of freedom present such an appeal that they argue since the Indian is happy in his own culture there should be no effort to destroy that culture by the innovations of civilization. They ask why all men should be made to conform to the ideals of Anglo-American civilization, why the Indian should be made to unlearn the lore of his fathers, why he should be taught to desire the luxuries and enervating pleasures of modern life, why he should be plunged into the complexities of an economic system which produces so many miseries that primitive life could not produce. They ask why, when civilized man loathes and deplores these things and looks longingly to the freedom and simplicity of the aborigine, this same aborigine should be made to abandon his pristine Eden for an acquaintance with these same deplorable things. They ask if this is not unjust. They ask why the Indian should be tainted with the leprosy of civilization when the health of barbarism leaves his blood virile and his wants but few.
Among the aborigines of America there was no such thing as tuberculosis, few or no specific blood diseases, no need of jails for the criminal or asylums for the orphaned, drug crazed, or insane, no drunkenness, no frenzied scramble for gold, and no concentration of power over food and other necessities of life. Men in those days were strong and the women likewise were strong. The weak were not bred. Every man then knew where he might find food and shelter, every man and women had an occupation. Every man knew that his children would have a home after this death and he knew that his house would never be robbed by any member of his tribe. He knew that his nation’s power rested upon his ability to fight. He was conscious that he was in reality a factor in his social group. The national councils of his people were simple, his code of ethics inflexible, his every right defined, and his status unquestioned. Who then could justly wish to wreck such simplicity and plunge him who enjoyed it into a sea of complexity filled with strange, ravenous fish? Who would wish to tear the Eskimo from his polar home and divest him of his wonderful ingenuity? Who would wish to make the Cree forget to use the simple things he found about him? Who would seek to rob the Sioux of his picturesque bonnet and shirt and take away his tepee? Who would wish to destroy the strange and wonderful social system of the northwest coast or blot out the unique art of that region? Why should the Pueblo be torn from his adobe town house and transplanted to a half-built shack of mill lumber? Why should the wonderfully evolved governmental system of the Iroquois be supplanted by any other political system? Why, indeed, should any Indian abandon his splendid traditions, his reverent religion, and his picturesque ceremonies for a mess of civilized pottage that is even now turning sour with age and infection? In a word, why should not broad America have room for her native people and leave them as they are? Why not allow the Indian to be himself? Why educate him, why civilize him, why Christianize him? Why teach him new arts foreign to his nature when his own native arts breathe of his very spirit? Why give him books of foreign literature and surfeit him with an education ill suited to his native environment? Why deculturate him and at the same time rave over his beautiful native products? Why not leave the Indian as he is and allow him to live and do as his own intellect or fancy directs?
The second division of the Indian’s friends endeavor to answer the “why.” They advocate for the Indian as for every man every good thing that enlightenment can bestow upon human kind, and assert that no man should be denied the right to enjoy the best and greatest things that all men and wide nature have produced. The conception of what is best and greatest differs of course as education, environment, and taste differ in the various classes of critics. The advocate of progress holds that every race that lives and grows must advance. He argues that progress is an inflexible law of growth, that when either animals or plants cease to develop they ripen and die. They use the analogy that when water ceases to run it becomes stagnant—and so with a nation or social group. To have reached its present stage, they explain, or any other former stage, has meant growth and development. Cessation of growth has meant stagnation and often degeneration. Innovations have been accepted, new conditions have brought new methods of meeting them. The struggle with unfavorable conditions has taught how to meet and overcome them. The persistent endeavor to advance, the struggle to attain, and the desire to obtain that which is better gives to a race its strength.
Today, in the age of rapid development, when developed man has extended his power over the earth, gradually encroaching upon native races, those native races can only survive as they respond to the conditions and requirements that the advanced culture thrusts upon them. With a million civilized people (so-called, rightly or not matters not), surrounding a small tract of land known as a “reservation,” containing from 500 to 80,000 native people, what salvation have these native people as such? Indians they may be, but can they, under the circumstances, live now as Indians lived before the whites came and bought or stole their land? Surrounded on all sides and with their native environment gone, do not their needs become the same as those of the whites about them? Do you not find them eating the same food, when they can get it, wearing the same clothing and wishing to, using the same tools and utensils, even in preference to their native ones? Do you not find them depending every largely upon every device of the dominant
culture for necessities, conveniences, and luxuries? How then, or why then, can one reasonably expect them to live in tepees and wear buckskins and war bonnets? How can they, when hunting ranges are diminished or obliterated and game extinct? Must not the Indian by force of circumstances turn to new things, accept new things, use new things, and employ the same methods of procuring these new things as are employed by the race that produced them and caused the change of conditions?
Between the conservationist and the extreme progressionist there should be a sane middle ground on which the best elements of both may be found.
The man who would have an Indian continue now as he was four centuries ago fails to tell us how he could exist, though possessed of every unadulterated traditional virtue. He does not tell us how the Indian is to be given back what was once his. He does not tell us how the Indian is to deal with the “white problem.” History has shown that even when laws are enacted prohibiting white men from living in the Indian country, it is still utterly impossible to keep the worst individuals of the white and other races from ignoring them and finding an asylum among the Indians, to the detriment of the Indians. They do not tell us how white men are going to be kept from trading with Indians and from using every influence to obtain used and unused Indian land. They do not tell us how, when good white men are free to mingle with the Indians, the Indians are going to be prevented from wanting the food and wares of white men and the education and refinements of white men.
Suppose twenty Indians should be permitted by law to camp in Battery Park, New York City. Dressed in all their primeval glory and having no knowledge of the English language or business methods, how could they live except by charity, by selling their wares to white men, or by making an exhibition of themselves? Would not poverty, disease, and death be their speedy lot if they were compelled to subsist upon what they could produce there for themselves without trading with non-Indians?
Recovering Native American Writings in the Boarding School Press Page 28