The Indian Dispossessed
Where the first has failed, the Indian is coming into full citizenship through agriculture, education, and Christian teaching. Where both have succeeded in their opposing efforts, we find the Indian figuratively, and often literally, on the rocks; educated, saved, and forlorn,—amiable, but aimless, in his arrested development. He has missed the fundamental lesson of mankind.
But, too often, without the foundation of good land the superstructure has fallen,—and upon us is responsibility for the most miserable being in the land; landless, idle, drunken, dirty, and altogether unattractive; for forty years discouraged in agriculture and encouraged in mendicancy under the ration system,—a degenerate by-product of our nation-building process.
Much that was vicious in the administration of Indian affairs has been eliminated during recent years. The system of Indian education was never better, never more liberally supported by the Government, and in allotting good land in severalty to Indians whose reservations still contain good land, we are fulfilling our obligation to those individual Indians. But from the portion of the nation's trust which fell into the political pot we have the barren reservations, perpetuated for many thousands of Indians of the second and third generation whom we must, perforce, continue to support, or "civilize" as railroad section hands, and ditch diggers, and sellers of bead-work, while the white man cultivates their good land. We
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