BLACKFOOT LODGE TALES

We were sitting about the fire in the lodge on Two Medicine.  Double Runner, Small Leggings, Mad Wolf, and the Little Blackfoot were smoking and talking, and I was writing in my note-book.  As I put aside the book, and reached out my hand for the pipe, Double Runner bent over and picked up a scrap of printed paper, which had fallen to the ground.  He looked at it for a moment without speaking, and then, holding it up and calling me by name, said:—­

“Pi-nut-u-ye is-tsim-okan, this is education.  Here is the difference between you and me, between the Indians and the white people.  You know what this means.  I do not.  If I did know, I should be as smart as you.  If all my people knew, the white people would not always get the best of us.”

“Nisah (elder brother), your words are true.  Therefore you ought to see that your children go to school, so that they may get the white man’s knowledge.  When they are men, they will have to trade with the white people; and if they know nothing, they can never get rich.  The times have changed.  It will never again be as it was when you and I were young.”

“You say well, Pi-nut-u-ye is-tsim-okan, I have seen the days; and I know it is so.  The old things are passing away, and the children of my children will be like white people.  None of them will know how it used to be in their father’s days unless they read the things which we have told you, and which you are all the time writing down in your books.”

“They are all written down, Nisah, the story of the three tribes, Sik-si-kau, Kainah, and Pik[)u]ni.”

INDIANS AND THEIR STORIES

The most shameful chapter of American history is that in which is recorded the account of our dealings with the Indians.  The story of our government’s intercourse with this race is an unbroken narrative of injustice, fraud, and robbery.  Our people have disregarded honesty and truth whenever they have come in contact with the Indian, and he has had no rights because he has never had the power to enforce any.

Protests against governmental swindling of these savages have been made again and again, but such remonstrances attract no general attention.  Almost every one is ready to acknowledge that in the past the Indians have been shamefully robbed, but it appears to be believed that this no longer takes place.  This is a great mistake.  We treat them now much as we have always treated them.  Within two years, I have been present on a reservation where government commissioners, by means of threats, by bribes given to chiefs, and by casting fraudulently the votes of absentees, succeeded after months of effort in securing votes enough to warrant them in asserting that a tribe of Indians, entirely wild and totally ignorant of farming, had consented to sell their lands, and to settle down each upon 160 acres of the most utterly arid and barren land to be found on the North American continent.  The fraud perpetrated on this tribe was as gross as could be practised by one set of men upon another.  In a similar way the Southern Utes were recently induced to consent to give up their reservation for another.