ORE than thirty thousand volumes have been written describing the character and history of the North American Indian. Man. of mystery-the earth his mother-the sun his father-a child of the mountains and the plainsa faithful worshiper in the great World-Cathedral-now a tragic soul haunting the shores of the Western Ocean. And yet there is no race of people concerning whose real character we are so completely and densely ignorant, -no people concerning whom we are so sensationally curious. The first and last impulse is to call him a savage. We are wholly unmindful of the fact that civilization is a tiger with the claws trimmed down, that all of us would scratch and bite were it not a breach of etiquette; they have allowed the claws to grow in Europe.

In defining a savage some one said the other day that the only necessary thing to do was to scratch the very thin veneer of the average man next to you, and you would find the savage. The Indian made reprisals, of course he did. Is it assumed that when he was attacked, his home pillaged and destroyed, his children slain, his land stolen, that he had no right to defend himself? Is Belgium condemned because the guns of an invading and devastating army were trained upon her homes, her libraries, and her cathedrals? Some of the reddest chapters of our frontier life were written in the blood of Indian warfare. It is partly to be accounted for in the fact that every geographical step of civilization westward was made over the demolished tepee of the Indian and the

despoliation of every interest of his life. In addition, after the greatest civil struggle in history had ended in the emancipation of one type of color, the victorious Captain said, "Let us have peace," and then forthwith took the flower and chivalry of the Federal army and sent them out West to cut in pieces another type of color.

The Indian said No! This land is ours. We hold a deed in fee simple, registered in the archives of heaven. "The ground is our mother," therefore we cannot part with this land,-it belongs to the generations past and to the generations yet to come. And he proceeded with a whip of small cords to drive the invader out of his Temple. The answer was the flash of the bayonet and the smell of powder. Under the iron heel of a militarism that finds only one parallel, we proceeded to demolish his philosophy of life, destroy his religion, seal the lips of his oratory, strike to the earth his age-long customs and ceremonies, deprive him of his personal rights, banish his costumes and manner of dress, forbid the wearing of eagle feathers, his symbol of "victory,"-for no eagle feather that had soared in the blue was ever allowed a place in his "war bonnet" save by vote of the council of the tribe as token of some deed of valor. If there exists the right to deprive the Indian of his "Victoria Cross," then is there not an equal right to ask the glorious veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic to remove from their coats the Grand Army button?

Civilization has corrupted the Indian instead of incorporating him into the body politic. For his code of honor we have substituted broken treaties. We have introduced whisky and venereal diseases. He has been housed upon in

hospitable reservations. Some of these reservations abound in minerals and agricultural prospects, but the majority of them are an assignment of territory upon which a white man would starve.

The reservation is without mitigation a system of slavery, despair, and vagabondage. The Indian may not leave the boundary of his prison-acreage without a passport. The will of the reservation superintendent is law, and he alone is responsible to the one power above him. All requests, however small or personal, must pass through his office. A Christian civilization should regenerate, the reservation degenerates. It devastates, dethrones, and destroys.

Among the three hundred and twenty thousand Indians remaining out of the original one million two hundred thousand-many of them allotted a graveyard of landscape upon which to eke out an existence there are four devastating forces helping to complete the work of decimating the race, one, starvation. You are pointed to the Blackfeet Indians, a noble band of men and women, located in Northern Montana, where rocks and high hills stand guard, where no water is, and where frost lays its smiting hand every month in the year. Senator Harry Lane of Oregon, in his report to the joint commission of Congress of the United States to investigate Indian Affairs, February 11th, 1915, Part 6 A, page 655, says: "These Indians live in small shacks, are poorly clad, have no means of livelihood, and are almost entirely dependent upon the government for the rations upon which they subsist. There is no game in this country, or at least not enough to afford them subsistence. And I was informed that in order to keep from starving they had killed and eaten all of the prairie dogs which formerly had their habitat thereabout, and had also resorted to eating skunks." Second, pyorrhea. The Congress of Dentists, assembled for the World Conclave at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, 1915, declared in discussion and by actual vote that pyorrhea was today one of the strongest forces menacing the health of the Indian. It is a safe prediction that no Indian ever saw a

dentist's chair upon his reservation. And there are seven special dentists provided for the care of 320,000 Indians. Third, tuberculosis. Superinduced in numerous instances by acute starvation, contracted in the very country whither we send tubercular patients for recovery. According to an official report in 1914 there are 25,000 Indians suffering with tuberculosis with available beds for the care of 5,000 patients. Fourth, trachoma. Surgeon General Rupert Blue of the United States Public Health Service Corps was appointed by the Congress of the United States to use his entire medical staff and report to Congress the health conditions of the Indian. His report rendered to Congress January, 1913, states that 65 per cent of the Indian population is going blind with trachoma.

This is but the alphabet; the literature of struggle, deprivation, starvation, and death goes on until dreary tomes might be written.

Another comment in the case

Up to 1912 out of 645 Acts 600 relate to Indians,-some to Indians in general, and some to separate tribes. Not all Acts, like those for opening a reservation, are enforced. In Kopler's Laws there are 140 sections of the Revised Statutes relating to Indians. There are three large volumes containing more than three thousand pages wherein is written confusion upon confusion and many times the death warrant of the Indian's hope. Leagues of red tape which add confusion and emphasize inefficiency have gone forward since the days of Grant, until there can be no hope for the Indian without a recodification of Indian Laws.

Among instances of how the Indian is tethered with deleterious and iniquitous land laws, there may be mentioned a law passed with reference to the Chippewa Indians on the White Earth Reservation. The law allowed the "mixed bloods" to sell land and timber, and since there was no one to determine which were mixed bloods, any Indian who liked sold his land and timber to the designing trader, and millions were mulcted from these Indians, their fertile farms taken and their hillsides denuded of timber.