The chief’s tent is the largest tent, and it is the council-tent, where every one goes who wants advice. In the evenings the head men go there to discuss everything, for the chiefs do not rule like tyrants; they discuss everything with their people, as a father would in his family. Often they sit up all night. They discuss the doings of all, if they need to be advised. If a boy is not doing well they talk that over, and if the women are interested they can share in the talks. If there is not room enough inside,
Indian children really get education in heart and mind, such as we ate beginning to give now to ours for the first time. They are taught a great deal about nature; how to observe the habits of plants and animals. It is not unlikely that when something like a human communication is established between the Indians and whites, it may prove a fair exchange, and the knowledge of nature which has accumulated, for we know not how long, may enrich our early education as much as reading and writing will enrich theirs. The fact that the Indian children are not taught English, makes the provision for education made by our government nugatory. Salaries are paid teachers year after year, who sit in the school-rooms (as Mrs. Hopkins says) and read dime novels, and the children play round, and learn nothing from them, except some few hymns by rote, which when visitors come they sing, without understanding one word of it. It is not for the advantage of the agents to civilize and teach the Indians. And by means of necessary interpreters there is constant mutual misunderstanding. Indians are made to sign papers that have very different contents from what they are told. The late William B. Ogden, of Chicago, who has always maintained that the Indians ought to have citizens’ rights, and be represented in Congress, founding his opinion on his life-long knowledge of the high-toned morality of Indians who wore blankets, said to my sister in 1853, that it was the stereotyped lie of the fur-traders (whose interest it was) that they could not be civilized; and the late Lewis Cass was their attorney, writing in the North American Review about it, for his fortune came largely through the fur-interests. We know from H. H.’s “Century of Dishonor,” that from the beginning the Christian bigots who peopled America looked upon the Indians as heathen, to be dealt with as Moses commanded Joshua to deal with the heathen of Syria, who “passed their children through the fire to Moloch,” and the services of whose temples were as licentious as they were cruel. Thus Christendom missed the moral reformation it might have had, if they had become acquainted with the noble Five Nations, and others whom they have exterminated. But, “it is never too late to mend,” as at last, the country is beginning to see.
