The Education of Indian Students at Carlisle (1891)
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man. . . .
“Put yourself in his place” is as good a guide to a proper conception of the Indian and his cause as it is to help us to right conclusions in our relations with other men. For many years we greatly oppressed the black man, but the germ of human liberty remained among us and grew, until, in spite of our irregularities, there came from the lowest savagery into intel- ligent manhood and freedom among us more than seven millions of our population, who are to-day an element of industrial value with which we could not well dispense. However great this victory has been for us, we have not yet fully learned our lesson nor completed our work; nor will we have done so until there is throughout all of our communities the most unequivocal and complete acceptance of our own doctrines, both national and religious. . . .
Inscrutable are the ways of Providence. Horrible as were the experi- ences of its introduction, and of slavery itself, there was concealed in them the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race,—seven millions of blacks from cannibalism in darkest Africa to citizenship in free and enlight- ened America; not full, not complete citizenship, but possible—probable– citizenship, and on the highway and near to it.
There is a great lesson in this. The schools did not make them citizens, the schools did not teach them the language, nor make them industrious and self-supporting. Denied the right of schools, they became English-speaking and industrious through the influences of association. Scattered here and there, under the care and authority of individuals of the higher race, they learned self-support and something of citizenship, and so reached their
Source: Francis Paul Prucha, ed., Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 260–261, 262, 263–264, 269; originally from Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian (1891).
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