Arthur Caswell Parker (1881–1955) was born on the Cattaraugus Seneca Indian Reservation in New York. The family moved to a suburb of New York City in 1891. Parker graduated from a public high school in 1897. He attended Centenary Collegiate Institute and Dickinson Seminary. He also attended Harvard and the University of Rochester. After serving as ethnologist for the New York State Library in 1903–4, he worked as archaeologist for the New York State Museum until 1924. He then served as director of the Municipal Museum in Rochester until his retirement in 1946. Parker joined the Society of American Indians in 1911, serving as secretary-treasurer from 1912 to 1915 and as president from 1916 to 1918. He also served as editor of the SAI’s magazine from 1913 until Gertrude Bonnin assumed the position in 1918. Besides his editorials, he wrote several essays, reprinted here, that were published in boarding school newspapers. He also produced collections of Seneca oral stories, a biography of Ely S. Parker, a juvenile novel, and numerous anthropological writings, including the trilogy Iroquois Uses of Maize and Other Food Plants (1910), The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet (1913), and The Constitution of the Five Nations (1916). (Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement, 263; Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 358–60)
America is the great mixing bowl of races wherein by some cosmic alchemy the great ruling race of the world is to be produced. Every racial element which is in the country today, or which is coming into the country tomorrow, is a potential element of the American race of the future. One of the first duties of a nation to itself is the insurance of its future quality. This means the Americanizing of the new elements which come to us, and it means likewise the Americanizing of the old elements. The diseases of Americanism do not constitute the healthy ideal. Graft, political corruption and money madness are disorders, not ideals.
The Aboriginal American, the Indian of our country, is destined to become an element in and of the new American race. The Indian cannot always remain an Indian. This is plainly evident. Either he must continue to suffer and to witness the degeneration of his tribe and its individuals, or he must become so imbued with the spirit of the new America that he absorb its teachings and save himself. The old America with its traditions is forever beyond his grasp. The new America with its wealth of opportunity is before him, and he must grasp it with a grip that knows no breaking.
Thus must the old American strive and attain. I say he must but left to himself he will not. Do you wonder why he will not? All races are not the same in many respects, and the aboriginal American race is not an imitative race as some are, but it is a race that loves and clings to that which itself has created. There is virtue in this. If the Indian will not grasp civilization unaided it must be brought to him. The race which supplanted the Indian in his own ancient home has its duty. This brings me back to the proposition that one of the first duties of a nation is to insure its future quality. The white American cannot afford to neglect the Indian American, for to do so would mean the injury of the future race. Realizing these facts, the government and the churches have expended time and money for the education and Christianizing of the Indian. Mighty work has been done, and one has only to review the history of the Indian schools and missions, to realize that greater Christian zeal, however, are urgent necessities.
The Indians whom I know best are the Iroquois of New York and Canada. In New York there are some 5,000 Iroquois living as a distinct people within the environments of civilization. They have outlived the conditions and necessities of barbarism, their cultural stage at the time of the discovery. They are surrounded by white people and have absorbed a large percentage of white blood. The average so-called New York Indian is in reality at least one-quarter white, and the percentage of white blood is yearly increasing, so that many nominal Indians are in reality white people. Notwithstanding, these mixed bloods are forced by the system under which they live to retain, develop, conserve, and propagate all the factors and elements that go to make up the peculiar problem that we call the Indian problem.
Strange to say, the Iroquois of New York, with all their boasted independence, are today a dependent people. This is not entirely their fault, for it is the result of a combination of circumstances not entirely of their own making. Treaties and concessions on the part of the State and various churches, have led them to believe that their bridges, roads, their schools and teachers must be built and maintained by the State, and that all churches, missions and ministers must be maintained by mission boards. Because of this they feel that there must be no effort on their own part. The memory of Sullivan’s campaign still lingers, and the fraudulent treaties of the Genesee Valley and of Buffalo Creek have left their sting, and with it a feeling that no work that the white man can do will ever undo the wrongs which they suffered. Whatever may be the merits of the case, the effect has been to create a feeling of dependence. Contrast, however, the Canadian Six Nations of Iroquois who maintain their own schools, pay their teachers, build their own roads and bridges, pay a medical superintendent and support a national hospital and dispensary. Then note what efficient men and women independent action has produced. The same is true of the Canadian Six Nations’ churches. Most of them, the English Church excepted, are supported almost entirely by the Indians themselves, with a result of greater interest and better attendance. With our New York Indians, the gospel of self-help must be inculcated.
To create and foster this spirit manual training schools are needed. These schools should be equipped for both the young and for adults. Men must know how to work, and for what purpose, before they can produce efficiently. A large portion of the New York Indians are fully competent, but those who are not should be placed on proper footing. Then when a man, a boy, or a girl is trained for a position he should be helped to secure one if he is unable to find one for himself. It is sheer folly to educate our Indians as tinners, printers and wagon builders, and then send them back to the reservation where there is no call for these trades.
With the means of reform just indicated, the churches would find it far easier to spread the higher Christian ideal of self, of home, and of ethical living. The influences, which now tend most to destroy, are the drink curse, and the lure of the Indian show. With higher ideals developed these things would lose their charm.1
In almost any conference of importance in which race progress is being discussed the most ordinary observer will discover that the Indian has two radically distinct classes of earnest champions. Each of these classes, though they differ widely as to what the Indian should be, is laboring to secure what it believes to be his best interests.
The first division consists of those who find so much to admire in the Indian as he was that they desire him to always remain substantially as he was. The romance of his life and history, his essentially religious nature, his interesting social organization, his mode of life in the open, his distinctive arts, and his intense love of freedom present such an appeal that they argue since the Indian is happy in his own culture there should be no effort to destroy that culture by the innovations of civilization. They ask why all men should be made to conform to the ideals of Anglo-American civilization, why the Indian should be made to unlearn the lore of his fathers, why he should be taught to desire the luxuries and enervating pleasures of modern life, why he should be plunged into the complexities of an economic system which produces so many miseries that primitive life could not produce. They ask why, when civilized man loathes and deplores these things and looks longingly to the freedom and simplicity of the aborigine, this same aborigine should be made to abandon his pristine Eden for an acquaintance with these same deplorable things. They ask if this is not unjust. They ask why the Indian should be tainted with the leprosy of civilization when the health of barbarism leaves his blood virile and his wants but few.
Among the aborigines of America there was no such thing as tuberculosis, few or no specific blood diseases, no need of jails for the criminal or asylums for the orphaned, drug crazed, or insane, no drunkenness, no frenzied scramble for gold, and no concentration of power over food and other necessities of life. Men in those days were strong and the women likewise were strong. The weak were not bred. Every man then knew where he might find food and shelter, every man and women had an occupation. Every man knew that his children would have a home after this death and he knew that his house would never be robbed by any member of his tribe. He knew that his nation’s power rested upon his ability to fight. He was conscious that he was in reality a factor in his social group. The national councils of his people were simple, his code of ethics inflexible, his every right defined, and his status unquestioned. Who then could justly wish to wreck such simplicity and plunge him who enjoyed it into a sea of complexity filled with strange, ravenous fish? Who would wish to tear the Eskimo from his polar home and divest him of his wonderful ingenuity? Who would wish to make the Cree forget to use the simple things he found about him? Who would seek to rob the Sioux of his picturesque bonnet and shirt and take away his tepee? Who would wish to destroy the strange and wonderful social system of the northwest coast or blot out the unique art of that region? Why should the Pueblo be torn from his adobe town house and transplanted to a half-built shack of mill lumber? Why should the wonderfully evolved governmental system of the Iroquois be supplanted by any other political system? Why, indeed, should any Indian abandon his splendid traditions, his reverent religion, and his picturesque ceremonies for a mess of civilized pottage that is even now turning sour with age and infection? In a word, why should not broad America have room for her native people and leave them as they are? Why not allow the Indian to be himself? Why educate him, why civilize him, why Christianize him? Why teach him new arts foreign to his nature when his own native arts breathe of his very spirit? Why give him books of foreign literature and surfeit him with an education ill suited to his native environment? Why deculturate him and at the same time rave over his beautiful native products? Why not leave the Indian as he is and allow him to live and do as his own intellect or fancy directs?
The second division of the Indian’s friends endeavor to answer the “why.” They advocate for the Indian as for every man every good thing that enlightenment can bestow upon human kind, and assert that no man should be denied the right to enjoy the best and greatest things that all men and wide nature have produced. The conception of what is best and greatest differs of course as education, environment, and taste differ in the various classes of critics. The advocate of progress holds that every race that lives and grows must advance. He argues that progress is an inflexible law of growth, that when either animals or plants cease to develop they ripen and die. They use the analogy that when water ceases to run it becomes stagnant—and so with a nation or social group. To have reached its present stage, they explain, or any other former stage, has meant growth and development. Cessation of growth has meant stagnation and often degeneration. Innovations have been accepted, new conditions have brought new methods of meeting them. The struggle with unfavorable conditions has taught how to meet and overcome them. The persistent endeavor to advance, the struggle to attain, and the desire to obtain that which is better gives to a race its strength.
Today, in the age of rapid development, when developed man has extended his power over the earth, gradually encroaching upon native races, those native races can only survive as they respond to the conditions and requirements that the advanced culture thrusts upon them. With a million civilized people (so-called, rightly or not matters not), surrounding a small tract of land known as a “reservation,” containing from 500 to 80,000 native people, what salvation have these native people as such? Indians they may be, but can they, under the circumstances, live now as Indians lived before the whites came and bought or stole their land? Surrounded on all sides and with their native environment gone, do not their needs become the same as those of the whites about them? Do you not find them eating the same food, when they can get it, wearing the same clothing and wishing to, using the same tools and utensils, even in preference to their native ones? Do you not find them depending every largely upon every device of the dominant culture for necessities, conveniences, and luxuries? How then, or why then, can one reasonably expect them to live in tepees and wear buckskins and war bonnets? How can they, when hunting ranges are diminished or obliterated and game extinct? Must not the Indian by force of circumstances turn to new things, accept new things, use new things, and employ the same methods of procuring these new things as are employed by the race that produced them and caused the change of conditions?
Between the conservationist and the extreme progressionist there should be a sane middle ground on which the best elements of both may be found.
The man who would have an Indian continue now as he was four centuries ago fails to tell us how he could exist, though possessed of every unadulterated traditional virtue. He does not tell us how the Indian is to be given back what was once his. He does not tell us how the Indian is to deal with the “white problem.” History has shown that even when laws are enacted prohibiting white men from living in the Indian country, it is still utterly impossible to keep the worst individuals of the white and other races from ignoring them and finding an asylum among the Indians, to the detriment of the Indians. They do not tell us how white men are going to be kept from trading with Indians and from using every influence to obtain used and unused Indian land. They do not tell us how, when good white men are free to mingle with the Indians, the Indians are going to be prevented from wanting the food and wares of white men and the education and refinements of white men.
Suppose twenty Indians should be permitted by law to camp in Battery Park, New York City. Dressed in all their primeval glory and having no knowledge of the English language or business methods, how could they live except by charity, by selling their wares to white men, or by making an exhibition of themselves? Would not poverty, disease, and death be their speedy lot if they were compelled to subsist upon what they could produce there for themselves without trading with non-Indians?
On the other hand the extreme progressionists take the opposite view. They assert that every element that makes an Indian an Indian should be expunged and supplanted by the elements of culture that make a white man a white man. They insist upon the Indian giving up his language, his religion, his folk-lore, his tribal relations, and his “Indianness,” and becoming a white man in thought and appearance, forgetting that this is a basic error resulting from confusing civic and ethnic elements.
Many an unfortunate Indian youth who has been schooled by this class has forgotten his mother tongue and has learned to despise his tribal history and look upon his ancestors as savage beasts deserving of no respect. He may have discoursed learnedly of Plato and Socrates, of Sanskrit verbs or Semitic substantives, of trigonometry and the nth power of pi, of the heroes of Thermopylae, of the astronomy of the Arabs, of the migrations of the Indo-Aryans, and the social system of the neo-Goths, but he may never have known of his own flexible language, of the philosophy of his own people’s sages, of Tecumtha or Hiawatha, of the heroes of the Pequoit massacre or those of Wounded Knee, of Chilcat art or Zuni pottery. To him a katchina or a kiva, a totemic system or linguistic stock, folklore and tradition, the Wallum Olum or the codices of the Aztecs, the Pawnee Hako or the Objiwa Mide Wiwin, mean nothing but pagan mummery.
Many an educated Indian who wears a white collar and a frock coat has been pointed to with pride by his tutors because he knew nothing of the “heathen ways” of his ancestors. Yet this very Indian when he commences to mingle with cultured men and women in the civilized world finds himself at a distinct disadvantage. He is flooded with questions he cannot answer, and his audience soon turns away in weariness, if not disgust, to welcome with open arms his unlettered brother clad in show buckskins and eagle feathers, whose English is abominable but sufficiently vivid to explain the picturesque things of his native life. The “de-Indianized” in his white collar then commences to think. He commences to study his people, learn their ways, and understand their system of thought. Then the whole scheme comes to him as a revelation. He feels that he has been outraged and robbed. Straightway he commences to “re-Indianize” himself. If his tutors have taught him to despise his heathen father and mother too deeply he is very likely to take the directly opposite view and pride himself on the idyllic side of their life. Thus do the wrongly educated Indians “go back to the blanket,” figuratively, and become strenuous champions of the “old regime.” It was an unjust and one-sided education that caused the revulsion of feeling. Despite what one may say I think the ordinary man who thinks broadly will respect the Indian for his pride in his people. He who holds his head high is apt to find more room on the sidewalk of life than he who hangs his head in shame.
Now then, where shall the sane middle ground be found? May it not be found in admitting that under the circumstances the Indian must give up certain things and take others in their places? May it not be found in asserting that the Indian need not entirely “deculturate” himself, but go on developing the best that is inherent to him? Will it not be well to admit that absolute uniformity of thought, method, and outward appearance are not absolutely necessary and that some virtue may be found in things and ways other than our own?
The writer of this article believes that as long as the Indian finds efficiency in his native ideas there is no absolute need of causing him to abandon those ideas. Every race as a result of its racial history develops certain characteristics, practices, or habits. The Frenchman would not copy the Englishman or use an English method of expressing himself, neither would the German imitate, except for profit, Japanese art or music. How incongruous any one of us would find the singing of the Russian national hymn by a Chinese coolie, who yet claimed to possess self-respect! How we would despise the Italian for donning the garb of a Turk and strolling down Broadway singing, “Erin go bragh.” We consider the abandonment of racial characteristics of virtue as indicative of shame or lack of pride and appreciation of one’s own culture, and we either laugh in derision or secretly despise the man who has so little dignity that he can find nothing in his blood worthy of standing for. Each man and every race should develop and be entitled to develop its own virile qualities and its own inherent virtues. For the Indian to cast aside all that goes to make him such and abandon all that his fathers have produced would be conducive of great harm. Without pride a race becomes dispirited, inefficient, incompetent, and the prey of every stronger force. The Indian of America may wear his own style of swimming suit and use his own special swimming stroke. He will progress faster and keep afloat better by so doing. He may swim in his own way and win if he will, but take the stones out of his pocket and the leaden weights from his feet. If this is done the Indian will not have to be upheld by a life preserver or be towed by a man of a lighter color.
If the Indian, now, will cast aside certain outgrown habits that bind him to past ages and will adjust himself to modern conditions, if he will rise to the demands of modern social and material culture, and develop his own best qualities, arts, and virtues, he may add materially, not only to art and literature but to philosophy and politics. Those Indians who have not become degenerated by the vices and diseases of civilization will transmit to the future race many healthy qualities and add to its brilliancy and virility. A review of the lives and achievements of men and women possessing Indian blood who have adjusted themselves to civilization substantiates this contention. It is not the dream of an enthusiast but the verdict of a statistician.
Under conditions as we find them now the Indian must buy, trade, or sell, he must own real and personal property. He must, therefore, know how to buy advantageously, how and when to sell, how to acquire, hold, and protect his property. He must learn how to resist the diseases and overcome the temptations and vices that civilization brings. It is therefore manifest that he must acquaint himself with these ways and customs in order that he may exist in health, live in more or less comfort, and protect his property. Otherwise the Indian will always be at disadvantage, he will fail to utilize the forces and the property within his grasp. He will be preyed upon, be robbed and shifted about if he still persists in clinging to his own methods to the exclusion of all others. This will not be because he is an Indian but because civilization in its present phase is competitive and predatory. We thrive on the weaknesses, the necessities, and the ignorance of others. We use as capital our greater strength, our stored-up supplies, and our superior knowledge. At the same time, seeing the misery this creates, we seek to alleviate it, and yet somehow generally in such a way that the advantage is still ours. This we call “hard-headed” business. We weaken our patients by prohibiting or making impossible the exercise through which we ourselves became strong; we administer anesthetics instead of mental and moral stimuli.
Howsoever unfortunate these things may be, yet, with all its crudities, this state of society is the one the Indian must successfully compete with or be destroyed. Whether the current phase of civilization is right or wrong it is nevertheless the state of society in which we live. Below its surface we drown, above it we are tempest driven upon but vapory supports, on its surface we may swim but we must still swim to survive. If we cease to struggle on we are drawn back by the current and down by sheer gravity. It is motion, progress, achievement that gives the right to live. Adjustment to present environment alone can save the man or beast that has lost its earlier environment. If there can be no adjustment there can be no hope for survival.
Any race which becomes satisfied with its present condition, believing that it has reached the ultimate goal, and refusing to consider a state beyond and another world to conquer, has reached its western shore and may only look out into the deep to see a setting sun. Even those who believe that their condition, their social or economic system, is the criterion, needing only proper remedies to correct the faults, are wrong. Like the diseased and dying limb of a pine tree overshadowed by a new and higher one, the old must perish even before it is truly perfect. Nothing can save it. The law of growth, the necessities of the tree, demand that the newer and higher limb receive the sap and grow in full vigor until another, ever higher, in turn shuts out the sun and the lower one drops wilted and dying from very lack of light and nourishment. So stage by stage races have developed. It will not avail to cling to the lower limb. Modern man is in the top branches of this ethnic tree; his slower brothers cling below on branches brittle and decayed. Many have dropped into the abyss below and we call their bones, for lack of better names, the Man of Spy, of Neanderthal, of Calaveras, or the pithecanthropus erectus.
The Indian is not inferior as a race or as an individual except as he is made so or so chooses to be. He has ability, even if much of it is dormant, and he has capacity. With a white man’s fighting chance he has always demonstrated this. The great need of teaching the Indian to appreciate and measure his own culture in the full knowledge of others is apparent. To this end the writer strongly believes in the necessity of an Indian college or university. Others, both Indian and non-Indian, share in this belief. In such an institution graduates of the higher schools might be trained in the art, literature, history, ethnology, and philosophy of their people. Along with such subjects might be taught political and social science and such other academic branches as might be found necessary.
The writer is not alone in the belief that the American Indian has something permanent to contribute to civilization. By a conservative policy alone he cannot contribute, however. To bring his contribution to humanity he must move upward and movement means progress. It is this belief of the race in itself that leads the Society of American Indians to state as one of its objects, “To promote and co-operate with all efforts looking to the advancement of the Indian in enlightenment that leaves him free as a man to develop according to the natural laws of social evolution,” and then at the same time to state as another object, “To present in a just light the true history of the race, to preserve its records, and emulate its distinguishing virtues.”2
With every thoughtful student of human development, I believe that the Indian possesses every ability and capacity for development and that he is capable of any attainment possible for men, providing his environment is made normal. This postulates that the Indian is equal in inherent capacity and therefore not an inferior.
Many mistakes and much misery have been produced by dogmatically asserting the contrary. Hampered by a false environment and artificial social conditions thought necessary to restrain him, the Indian has found it difficult to develop along normal lines. The education, civilization, and incentive came from without and not from within. It was a gift and not a growth. When the contrary was occasionally true, the Indian’s social and legal position prevented his highest success.
That some Indians attained great distinction as leaders in the white world proves the vitality of the race and demonstrates its capacity. The Indian is a capable, useful American when he is permitted to be. There can be little doubt that the majority of Americans desire justice and progress for the Indian. Americans as a rule believe in fair play. As the law stands this is now difficult to give. An uncertain and indetermined status makes it possible for dishonest interests to prey upon the Indian so affected.
There often has been the lack of fair play and often no redress. The law blocks the way. The Indian has never been the subject of searching sociological study. Basic causes for conditions have never been studied. Hence the “problem.” There must be a new beginning. Scientific system must supplant disorder. To prepare for such a change it is first necessary to understand the laws that now affect the Indian. Obsolete and injurious laws must be repealed; needful laws must be enacted. The exact status of every tribe, band, or class of Indians must be determined as far as existing law affects his status. In this way a true legal basis will be found on which to build anew. The legal position of the Indian is now so involved that with the further changes that come through allotments, the payment of claims, new contracts, through intermarriage and changes of administration and policy, matters only grow more complex. Laws made for the “blanket Indian,” of two generations ago are still in force to make life miserable for the educated Indian of today seeking to compete in modern life. Competent men are declared incompetent, an Indian congressman is arrested for selling his own land, an Indian attorney is prevented from buying a cow with his own money, and an educated Indian leaves his children to discover that with all his education and civilization he is declared incompetent to make a will disposing of his property. These “incompetent” men, on the other hand, had been fully trusted with the legal and financial interests of their white neighbors. They were only incompetent because of obsolete Indian law.
The answer to many discouraging remarks about Indian capacity and progress is to point to the legal position into which the Indian is thrust. A reservation Indian is enslaved by his reservation Indian environment. To remedy such a state of affairs was the object of the Carter Indian Code Bill (H. R. 18334, 62nd Congress, Second session). This bill was drafted by the Society of American Indians and introduced by Congressman Charles D. Carter. It provides for a new epoch in Indian affairs, and when passed will simplify the work of the government in dealing with the Indian and give the Indian a foundation upon which he may stand securely. It will make possible a rapid transition from a lower stage to a higher one and render justice more a common matter. It will reduce the cost of administrating Indian affairs and save large amounts of money both for the government and for the Indian. It will pave the way for freedom and self-government and mark the passing of “ward” and “subject” and ultimately give the Indian American now possessing “diminutive rights” every right that the nation vouchsafes to its sovereign people.3