Leaving my mother, I returned to the school in the East. As months
passed over me, I slowly comprehended that the large army of white
teachers in Indian schools had a larger missionary creed than I had
suspected.
It was one which included self-preservation quite as much as Indian
education. When I saw an opium-eater holding a position as teacher of
Indians, I did not understand what good was expected, until a Christian
in power replied that this pumpkin-colored creature had a feeble mother
to support. An inebriate paleface sat stupid in a doctor's chair, while
Indian patients carried their ailments to untimely graves, because his
fair wife was dependent upon him for her daily food.
I find it hard to count that white man a teacher who tortured an
ambitious Indian youth by frequently reminding the brave changeling that
he was nothing but a "government pauper."
Though I burned with indignation upon discovering on every side
instances no less shameful than those I have mentioned, there was no
present help. Even the few rare ones who have worked nobly for my race
were powerless to choose workmen like themselves. To be sure, a man was
sent from the Great Father to inspect Indian schools, but what he saw
was usually the students' sample work _made_ for exhibition. I was
nettled by this sly cunning of the workmen who hookwinked the Indian's
pale Father at Washington.
My illness, which prevented the conclusion of my college course,
together with my mother's stories of the encroaching frontier settlers,
left me in no mood to strain my eyes in searching for latent good in my
white co-workers.
At this stage of my own evolution, I was ready to curse men of small
capacity for being the dwarfs their God had made them. In the process of
my education I had lost all consciousness of the nature world about me.
Thus, when a hidden rage took me to the small white-walled prison which
I then called my room, I unknowingly turned away from my one salvation.
Alone in my room, I sat like the petrified Indian woman of whom my
mother used to tell me. I wished my heart's burdens would turn me to
unfeeling stone. But alive, in my tomb, I was destitute!
For the white man's papers I had given up my faith in the Great Spirit.
For these same papers I had forgotten the healing in trees and brooks.
On account of my mother's simple view of life, and my lack of any, I
gave her up, also. I made no friends among the race of people I loathed.
Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature, and
God. I was shorn of my branches, which had waved in sympathy and love
for home and friends. The natural coat of bark which had protected my
oversensitive nature was scraped off to the very quick.
Now a cold bare pole I seemed to be, planted in a strange earth. Still,
I seemed to hope a day would come when my mute aching head, reared
upward to the sky, would flash a zigzag lightning across the heavens.
With this dream of vent for a long-pent consciousness, I walked again
amid the crowds.
At last, one weary day in the schoolroom, a new idea presented itself to
me. It was a new way of solving the problem of my inner self. I liked
it. Thus I resigned my position as teacher; and now I am in an Eastern
city, following the long course of study I have set for myself. Now, as
I look back upon the recent past, I see it from a distance, as a whole.
I remember how, from morning till evening, many specimens of civilized
peoples visited the Indian school. The city folks with canes and
eyeglasses, the countrymen with sunburnt cheeks and clumsy feet, forgot
their relative social ranks in an ignorant curiosity. Both sorts of
these Christian palefaces were alike astounded at seeing the children of
savage warriors so docile and industrious.
As answers to their shallow inquiries they received the students' sample
work to look upon. Examining the neatly figured pages, and gazing upon
the Indian girls and boys bending over their books, the white visitors
walked out of the schoolhouse well satisfied: they were educating the
children of the red man! They were paying a liberal fee to the
government employees in whose able hands lay the small forest of Indian
timber.
In this fashion many have passed idly through the Indian schools during
the last decade, afterward to boast of their charity to the North
American Indian. But few there are who have paused to question whether
real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of
civilization.