PROCEEDINGS OF THE BOARD OF INDIAN COMMISSISONERS AT THE TWELFTH LAKE MOHONK INDIAN CONFERENCE.

FIRST SESSION.

WEDNESDAY, October 10, 1894.

The twelfth annual meeting of the Lake Mohonk Indian Conference began at the Lake Mohonk House, Ulster County, N. Y., on Wednesday, October 10, 1894, at 10 o'clock in the morning.

Prayer was offered by Bishop Whipple.

The conference was called to order by Mr. A. K. Smiley, the host, at whose invitation all the members were assembled. "It is," said Mr. Smiley, "a great satisfaction to see so many of you here, two hundred who have come expressly to attend this conference, besides one hundred and fifty guests already in the house whom we shall count as members of the conference. It is a pleasure to see so many men and women here who are veterans in the service, who have been identified with it from the beginning, and who have seen the great change wrought in the condition of the Indians. It is also pleasant to see so many new and earnest men and women coming up here to help us solve this great Indian problem. It is my great desire, as I have no doubt it is yours, to do something that shall help the Indians in the future. My object in calling you together is that we may get a variety of views. All the views that are presented are to be discussed, and at the close of the conference we shall try to arrive at some general conclusions which shall be unanimously adopted. We have accomplished this in great measure in past years, and I hope this year will prove no exception. I give you all a hearty welcome."

Mr. Smiley then nominated Hon. Merrill E. Gates as chairman of the conference. Dr. Gates was unanimously elected, and in accepting the chair, spoke as follows:

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

[By Hon. Merrill E. Gates, LL. D.]

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Political science tells us that it is dangerous to give absolute authority to any monarch, even though he should be very good and very wise-dangerous to let him manage everything to suit himself. Mr. Smiley has a way of arranging everything here for our pleasure, and his sway is an approach to . that dangerously attractive rule of the benevolent autocrat which, for the most part, lulls into placid acquiescence the well-pleased subjects. But now and then he is impelled to do an arbitrary and unwise thing (like putting me into this chair) to remind you that it is not wise to trust always to an absolute monarch, however good his intentions may be. You bear his arbitrary selection as well as you can when he thus reminds you of his autocratic power; and I thank you that you so generously help me to "make the best of it."

PROGRESS, BUT NOT YET ATTAINMENT.

I know that we have all been touched and have been prepared for our work together by the worship of the morning and by the words of our host. This has never been simply a pleasure excursion which has brought us to the summit of Mohonk, although we have found so much pleasure here, and have been reminded of a phrase of quaint old Andrew Fuller: "We serve not a God so severe but that he alloweth us sauce to our meat, and recreation with our vocation." Earnest purpose and high endeavor have characterized our meetings, even in the fairest weather and the pleasantest social surroundings. When we have met in the most glorious autumn weather, with the sun shining, we have rejoiced. And this morning, as the storm rages and the rain pours, I am reminded of a letter of Carlyle, written out of the depths of London fog and gloom, to Emerson, over seas. He says that he is terribly depressed, that for days the bleakest of winds has been blowing thick clouds about him; but in thought he rises above all the gloom, and says, "Remember, only a mile straight up, and it is clear, eternal blue all the year round." So, whatever difficulties and doubts may overlie this Indian problem, as the storm-cloud lies over us this morn

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ing, we know that if we lift up our eyes to the unchanging principles which always govern, the pure, clear sunshine of God's truth is always there, unclouded; and from the Author of Truth a light, a heat, a drawing power, ray out and insure the maintenance of the laws which hold all human affairs subject to divine order, and all the spheres of heaven in place. As friends of justice and of Christianization for the Indians, we are on the right side. And perhaps we have made as much progress in these last ten years as it is well for us to make. If we believed that this work waseasy, that we could right all wrongs and accomplish all needed reforms by simply meeting here, enjoying our philanthropic "strawberries and whipped cream," we should not be fitted to do the work required of soldiers of the cross. Much that is hard remains to be done, and ought soon to be begun. But there is progress enough to keep us in good courage.

"THE UNWEARIED, UNOSTENTATIOUS, INGLORIOUS STRUGGLE."

When Lecky, the historian of European Morals, wished to single out for record "the three or four perfectly virtuous acts recorded in the history of nations," he names among them, as the crowning glory of the Anglo-Saxon race, the "unwearied, unostentatious, and inglorious struggle against slavery" which has been waged by the men and women of our blood through the centuries. We have seen something of that crusade, "unostentatious, unwearied," and for a long time "inglorious"; and we have seen something of the after-results of slavery, though we have still much to account for with the race so long enslaved in America before we can hope to regard our long account with them as settled. And so great is the number of our negro fellow-citizens, the seven millions to whom we owe a debt of helpful service, that when we meet here to deliberate about the welfare of a quarter of a million Indians, our work sometimes seems lacking in the sense of importance which attends upon planning for large numbers. While it is true that, reckoned numerically, the interests for which we work here do not concern millions of people, yet we need to be reminded that if a city of a quarter of a million inhabitants were overtaken by a conflagration, or by any great calamity which left its citizens in need of help, how quickly we should respond to appeals for aid! And the quarter of a million of Indians do not need to be set apart in a city by themselves to convince us that there are enough of them, and that they are needy enough, to call forth our sympathy. A passion for finding out what we can do to help this or that class among ushas grown up in the hearts of Christian people. Many of you remember that bright young English woman who, five or six years ago, came to this country on a special mission. She had found out that our telegraph messenger boys had no society for disseminating the gospel among them, and she had come from London to undertake the especial work of forming such a mission.

Often contiguity in a city, the bond of neighborhood association, indicates for us those whom we are under especial obligation to help. But who is the Indian's neighbor? Where is the community which from motives of contiguity will be interested in him? With what kind of men is he thrown into association, when his "white neighbors" are his associates? The answer to these questions you all know. The Indians are the most friendless race among us, and they have not even that great compensating gain which the God of infinite justice and mercy has given to the recently enslaved negro race. The negro, as a result of slavery, knows how to labor. This is one good result among many bad results of generations of unrequited toil in slavery. The inherited capacity for steady industry is the better side of the results of slavery. Subjected to the hard tasks of the plantation, the slave and his descendants, as an "advantage of their disadvantages," at least know how to toil. All this discipline of toil has been denied to the "people of the restless foot and the wandering eye," as our beloved missionary, Bishop Whipple, has called the Indians. The right arm has never been taught to labor. They must be saved from their own love of idleness. The Indians are still the slaves of that liberty, uncontrolled by law, which ruins and enslaves those who fancy themselves free to follow their lowest desires. We ought to feel, we do feel, a chivalrous desire to save them from themselves. And the hope that we can be of help to them, though they be comparatively few in number, may well bind us to one another with the pleasant sense of comradeship in service. I like to think that if Mr. Howells were indeed conducting his amiable "Visitor from Altruria" through our country, and were to bring him to Mohonk this week, his benevolent and other worldly visitor would feel himself very much at home among us here, as truly at home as in any unselfish gathering to which he could be introduced.

PROGRESS WITHIN TEN YEARS.

Some things in the past we may review with pleasure. It is ten years since I first attended one of these conferences, and it is interesting to think how much has been. accomplished since that time.

THE TRIBAL RELATION IS REPLACED BY THE FAMILY RELATION.

At that meeting, when any one of us dared to say that the tribal relation should be broken up, there were those who declared, almost "with tears," that we had no right to touch that sacred relation; that this tribal tie was peculiar to the Indians, was their distinguishing mark, their birthright, and that we had no right to force upon them our American ideas of the family and the state. Then we began to compare views; and by virtue of those qualities which Kidd in his Social Evolution reminds us are those that carry man beyond and above his brother animals-by virtue of our capacity to modify our instincts and our habits by reason, and to act at once socially and rationally-we were able to exchange views and to arrive at truth, until now you can not find any one who will defend the maintenance of the tribal relation.

THE RESERVATION SYSTEM IS DOOMED.

When some of us who were thought to be fanatics began to say that the reservation must be broken up, many others said: "No! By sacred treaty stipulations we must keep the reservations intact forever." But a careful study of the subject showed us that no people could acquire a national right in the soil, in any proper sense, whose claim was based merely on roving over the country to hunt and fish. The conviction deepened that the changes asked for were really in the interest of the Indians, and that we might safely modify the treaties if we did so in the spirit of just and kind regard for their best interests. All now see that the reservation is an unmitigated evil. We have tried in vain to mitigate its evils. It must go. It is going.

THE SEVERALTY BILL IS IN OPERATION.

You remember our first efforts to secure a bill giving land in severalty to Indians, and how hopelessly improbable seemed its passage by Congress. Yet for a long time, now, this law has been upon the statute books. The important question to-day is whether it is not being applied too rapidly, and in certain tribes with too little real regard for the welfare of the Indians. Many fear that in some reservations it is not the interest of the Indians that is considered, but the interests of the white men who want the land. Senator Dawes, who drafted that bill and carried it through Congress, warns us that we may be in danger of going too fast. At these sessions, through our workers from the field, we hope to learn what are the weak points in the law and the dangers in its execution. But the idea that seemed so hopeless ten years ago, to give a home to every Indian fantily, has passed into the laws of the land, because men and women have applied themselves to educating the conscience of the people. Friends who gather here have been in position to disseminate ideas, to influence and control public opinion upon this question.

We owe much to the weekly religious press, which has advocated these views, and not only to the religious press, but to the secular press, especially to the journals which have been represented at Mohonk, and to those which have indorsed or have helpfully criticised our views.

WE HAVE SCHOOLS FOR TWO-THIRDS OF ALL THE INDIAN CHILDREN.

About eight years ago, when at one of our Washington conferences we were drafting the platform, I remember proposing that we incorporate a request to Congress to provide immediately a system of schools for the Indians at the Government's expense, adequate to teach all the Indian children and youth. When this proposed resolution was brought before the conference, many said: "Let us not embody in the platform a request which may be called Quixotic. It is utterly hopeless that we' should have for many years schools enough for all the Indian children. Do not ask for anything so impracticable, or Congress will do nothing." Nevertheless, we did ask for such a system. And how much nearer we have already come to attaining such a system than we dared to hope would be possible within a few years! We actually have school accommodations now provided, I suppose, for fully two-thirds of the Indian children of school age. Is that a correct statement, Dr. Dorchester? Dr. DORCHESTER (ex superintendent of Indian schools). Just about two-thirds.

BETTER STILL, GET INDIAN CHILDREN INTO OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. President GATES. And we all hope that school accommodations will be at once provided for the remaining third. But what we desire, as a better thing than the provision of additional schools exclusively for the Indians, is the placing of the Indian children and youth in the public school system of our States and Territories, either in the West or in the East. To have a uniform school system extend over the white

children and the Indian children in the States and Territories which contain Indian reservations is the object for which we should strive. To provide in some way (by a proper use of funds held in trust for the Indians) for the necessary expenses for highways, schools, and courts of justice for those reservations where Indians have taken land in severalty is a practical measure which this conference should strongly advocate. One system of law and courts, one system of public schools, for the white citizens and the red citizens of these States is the end at which we should aim.

A VANISHING POLICY IS WHAT WE WANT FOR THE INDIAN QUESTION. We do not want to perpetuate a distinctive Indian policy of any kind. We want to see the beginning of the end of special legislation and special administration for Indians.

As we have compared views here for the last ten years, always welcoming the clearest expression of diverging views, three stubborn facts have come to the front again and again."

THE AGENT MAKES OR MARS THE

RESERVATION-CHANGES FOR POLITICAL AND PARTISAN REASONS ARE A CURSE.

1. While the Indians are in this transition stage from reservation life to intelligent citizenship, while there is an "Indian problem,” the Indian agent is the key to that problem. We hope that within a few years reservation and agent may alike be things of the past. But for the present, with several tribes, the agent is an absolute necessity. Under our present laws for reservation life we find that wherever we have a good agent, a man of integrity, of moral power and of experience, we begin to see prosperity, progress, and hope on the reservation, whatever the past life there may have been. And wherever and whenever at a given agency the position of agent is filled by a weak man, a wicked man, or an incompetent partisan, a miserable henchman, the creature of the spoils system, at that reservation, however promising the progress may have been before his advent, we find that a hopeless state of affairs at once ensues. What had been gained is speedily lost. In the place of progress and hopefulness we have discontent, despair, and a relapse into savagery, if not lawless acts of outrage.

It is more evident with each year of experience that the lack of a systematic application of the approved principles of civil service reform is the great lack of our agency system. President Cleveland, in his first administration, comes into office with promises of reform. Yet, out of sixty-two or three agents, he displaces all but three, and in most cases appoints men of less experience, and frequently of no character. Of course, the work goes backward. President Harrison succeeds him with the same assurances of interest in the Indians, and the same promises of reform. Yet he makes exactly the same record, displacing all but three or four of the Indian agents during his term of office. It seems as if Providence, by this exact balancing of the number of displacements for political reasons, for what seem to be partisan reasons, under these two administrations, one of each party, had purposely arranged matters so as to enable all who believe in civil service reform to express themselves with utter freedom concerning this matter without incurring the charge of partisan bias! We find that this accursed spoils system overturns all that has been accomplished in the way of progress on the reservations. No sooner is a promising state of affairs secured under a wise agent than his displacement by a new and inexperienced man extinguishes hope and stops progress.

How are we going to put an end to this state of affairs? Let us not forget to recognize the great service which President Harrison did to the cause by extending civilservice regulations so as to cover a large number of the employees of the Indian service. And let us not forget that President Cleveland, since he began his second administration, has done us great service by still further extending these regulations. But, after all, the agent is the pivotal point on each reservation. And because agents are appointed by the President, "by and with the advice and consent of the Senate," it is sometimes said that we can not get the agents under civil-service regulations. Those of us who have had experience at Washington know how difficult it is to rescue from the grip of the spoilsmen any appointments upon which Senators or Representatives have succeeded in laying their hands to make of them personal perquisites or party capital. Miss Sparhawk has recently written a story which I have just had the pleasure of reading in manuscript, which is soon to be published, and I trust may have a wide circulation. She calls the story Senator Intrigue and Inspector Noseby. The dramatic scenes in which she presents the evils that attend the displacement of the good agent by the bad are not overdrawn, but can be duplicated, in fact, at reservation after reservation. I think that we ought to have from this conference such a deliverance of public opinion as shall lay most emphatically before the President of the United States his duty to make no changes in Indian

agents except where a change is necessary in order to put out inefficient and morally bad agents; and then to appoint to vacancies so made only men of approved fitness for the work, and to appoint them under the principles and in accordance with the spirit of that civil-service reform which he himself has so strongly favored. If the President of the United States will announce that hereafter he will not appoint any man to an Indian agency unless that man has first been recommended by a nonpartisan commission whom the President might name (either the United States Board of Civil Service Commissioners, or, better still, a nonpartisan committee of experienced friends of the Indians), he would do more to forward the civilization of the Indians and their fitness for citizenship than can be accomplished by any other one act which is now within his power to perform.

A GRADUAL PROCESS OF THOROUGH EDUCATION.

2. The second fact which appears with increasing clearness from year to year is that the reform we seek can be secured only by a gradual process of education. It was absolutely necessary for the inauguration of reform that we have certain laws enacted. The most important of these needed laws are already upon our statute books. But no law can make a bad man good or a savage man civilized. We hope to do in a generation or two for the Indians, by education and christianization, what a slow process of social evolution, if left to itself, would take centuries to accomplish. Many of us remember that when President McCosh, of Princeton, at our conference two or three years ago, read to us a most interesting paper upon this subject he began by saying that he felt a warm interest in this question because he was descended from a tribe of men, the wild Highlanders of Scotland, who but a few generations ago wore nearly as much paint and as little clothing as the Indian tribes which interest us here; and he had felt that what had been done for his own people by Christian missions and schools by like means he could accomplish for this inferior race, so long the "wards of the United States."

We are attempting to accomplish much in a short time. Our hope lies in a general and thorough system of education-of education for the hand and the heart as well as for the head. Such a work of education takes time and calls for patience. It demands a well-defined and an adequate policy.

SHOULD NOT INDIAN SCHOOLS BE UNDER THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION? And, when we have at the head of the system of Indian schools a competent and strong man who is equal to laying down and carrying out such a system, it should be made impossible for petty departmental clerks and political spoilsmen to fetter and cripple him at every point and to ruin his plans. We should have represented here a sufficient strength of public opinion to enable us to secure a law that would make impossible such ruinous interference with our Indian schools. For my own part, I wish that it might be possible to make the direction of our Indian schools as far as possible independent of the Indian Bureau. The business of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs is concerned so largely with the land problem and with the receipt and expenditures of moneys for Indian lands and "Indian claims" that, in the nature of things, it is difficult to secure at that Bureau such attention as is necessary to insure the greatest efficiency for a system of education which shall fit the Indian for citizenship. Is it not practicable to consider the question whether, following the precedent already made with schools in Alaska, the management of the Indian schools under the superintendent appointed for the purpose might be made more independent, and might report directly to the Commissioner of Education at Washington rather than to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs? In this way the best interests of education would be more directly and constantly considered, and the interest of the schools be separated as far as possible from the consideration of other phases of Indian affairs.

FOR THE BEST RESULTS NO OTHER POWER THAN THE LOVE OF CHRIST WILL SUFFICE.

3. As we come close to this problem of education for the Indians we are forced to see, as we are in all systems of education, the value of the individual life, of the individual soul. We come close enough to the lives of Indians to learn to value men and women, boys and girls, one by one. And the conviction grows upon us that, to transform these savage lives into the well-ordered lives of American citizens, we need the mightiest force which can be brought to bear upon the individual life. There is but one force in the universe which is sufficient for these needs.

In the light of the mightiest motive power which can work upon the life of teacher and students in any system of education, this whole work takes on a nobler aspect. If the rescue of a quarter of a million of Indians from savagery be looked at merely as a question of political economy, and were only to be judged by the economic value of the results secured, we might after all be driven to confess that,