111

A WORD
WITH THE WOMEN

(By Elia W. Peattie)

Miss Marey Thomas, dean on Bryn
Mawr, has been nominated for one of
the alumni trustees of Cornell university
to be elected in June. This is the
first time in the history of the leading
American universities that a woman
has been named for trustee.

Thirty-one out of forty-one graduates
from the State Normal school were
women.

The system of kindergarten recently
established on some of the Indian reservations
has proved so successful that
it will probably be continued and extended.
Under this insidious instruction --
if such a term may be employed--
the children lose their native shyness,
and become friendly and playful. It
greatly assists them, too, in acquiring
the dexterity which is needed for the
present conditions of their life, which
is, indeed, different from the dexterity
required by their fathers and inherited
by them.

It is very common to remark upon the
disadvantages under which the educated
male Indian labors, but they are
really no greater than those encountered
by the Indian girl, who is sent to
the agency or mission school, given a
fair education in books, taught sewing,
cooking, housekeeping and such civilized
occupations and then permitted to
return to the lodge of her fathers, where,
after a few months of futile effort to
sustain herself in the civilization she
has arduously acquired, she sinks back
into her condition of savagery, marries
an Indian becomes a prisoner on the
reservation, and sinks into disheartened
apathy. She is a failure both as a civilized
and as a savage woman. It may be
sad that she suffers the inconveniences
and disadvantages of both civilization
and savagery and enjoys the pleasures
and liberties of neither. She may be
fitted by her education for teaching
school, sewing or domestic work, but
it is seldom that she can obtain a position
where she can show her capabilities
in any of these directions, or where
she can in any way secure independence.

Under such conditions the work of the
Indian department seems little more than
a waste and the efforts of the missionaries
to establish new standards is little more
than a cruelty, unintentional though it is.
Between the destruction of the natural state
of the Indian and the failure to supply
anything that is really a substitute, the
Indian man or woman degenerates into
a melancholy, vicious, irresponsible and
sullen creature. It may well be questioned
if the Indian woman was not a much happier
being when she was undisturbed by
book learning and was left to choose her
savage lord and to adore him in her own
wild fashion to await his homecoming
with her naked babies playing about her
tepee to skin his slain beasts for him, and
serve him in proud humility. Now her old
ideals are gone, and no new ones of a nature
consistent with her environment have
been provided.

The commonplace respectability to
which the Anglo-Saxon race in America
and out of it reduces or attempts to reduce
inferior races is one of the most disheartening
things in the world. Its arrogant
method of destruction, its ruthless
disregard for any traditions gave its own,
its indifference to any originality on the
par of these primeval races, its contempt
for primeval religions its lack of sympathy
with the simple amusements of such
people, convict it of being an obstinate
race, which may break, destroy, crush and
obliterate aboriginal peoples but which
will fail when it attempts to preserve, develop
or rain them.

The Indian girl docile, quiet, shy and
obedient is today a pathetic figure. She
is [?] about by the shuttlecock of circumstance
and prevented from forming
her life along consistent lines.