Henry Roe Cloud (1884–1950) was born as Wo-Na-Xi-Lay-Hunka (War Chief) on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska. He attended the Genoa Industrial School, the Santee Normal Training School, and the Mount Hermon School before attending Yale University. After graduating from Yale in 1910, he spent a year at Oberlin Seminary College and then transferred to the Auburn Theological Seminary, where he earned his bachelor of divinity degree. He also received a master’s degree in anthropology from Yale in 1914, making him the first full-blood Native American to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Yale. One year later he founded the American Indian Institute in Kansas, a Christian preparatory school for Indians. He acted as the institute’s president, principal, chief fundraiser, and editor of its journal, the Indian Outlook. Roe Cloud later became superintendent of Haskell Institute. He was a founding member of the Society of American Indians and an advocate for Indian education. (Littlefield and Parins, Biobibliography: Supplement 191; Peyer, American Indian Nonfiction, 388–89; Pfister; Southern Workman, March 1921, 125)
Education is for life—life in the workaday world with all its toil, successes, discouragements, and heartaches. Education unrelated to life is of no use. Education is the leading-out process of the young until they themselves know what they are best fitted for in life. Education is for complete living; that is, the educational process must involve the heart, head, and hand. The unity of man is coming to the forefront in the thought of the day. We cannot pay exclusive attention to the education of one part and afford to let the other part or parts suffer. Education is for service; that is, the youth is led to see the responsibilities as well as the privileges of his education so that he will lend a helping hand to those who are in need.
Indian education offers no exception to these general definitions. The educational needs of the Indian can be best seen in the light of his problems. He has before him two problems—the white man’s and his own peculiar racial problem. The one confronting the white child is the Indian’s also, for, if the goal for the Indian is citizenship, it means sharing the responsibilities, as well as the opportunities, of this great Republic.
The task of educating the American young is a stupendous one. The future welfare of the American nation depends upon it. Children everywhere must be brought to an appreciation of the great fundamental principles of the Republic as well as to a full realization of its dangers. It required long, toilsome marches of peoples beyond the seas to give us our present-day civilization. Trial by jury came through William the Conqueror. America’s freedom was at the cost of centuries of struggle. America’s democracy is both the direct and the indirect contribution of every other civilized nation. Our wide-open door of opportunity was paid for by untold sacrifice of life and labor. It involves the story of the sturdy and brave frontiersman, the gradual extension of transportation facilities westward, the rise of cities on the plains. So great and rapid has been this progress, that already the cry of the conservation of our natural resources is ringing in our ears.
Along with these great blessings, there are the national dangers stalking through the land. I need but mention them. The stupendous economic development of the United States has meant the amassing of great and unwieldy wealth in few hands. It has meant the creation of a wide gap between the rich and poor. Industries have been revolutionized by the introduction of machinery. There has now grown up the problem of the relation of labor and capital. Our railroad strikes and mine wars are but symptoms of this gigantic problem. Immigration and the consequent congestion in our cities have put the controlling political power into the hands of the “boss.” There is the tenement problem of physical degeneracy and disease. It requires no prophet to foresee the increase of these problems and dangers, owing to the war now raging across the sea. The desolation of those countries, the inevitable tax burdens, will mean an even greater influx of immigration into this country. There is the problem of “fire water,” that has burned out the souls of hundreds of thousands of men, to say nothing of the greater suffering of their wives, mothers, and children. There is the big national problem of race prejudice. Is America truly to be the “melting pot” of the nations?
These are the problems confronting white youth, and, I repeat, they are the Indian’s also.
Besides these, the Indian has his own peculiar race problems to meet. There is the problem of home education. Education in the Indian home is almost universally lacking. The vast amount of education which white children receive in their homes—a great many of them cultured and Christian homes, where, between the ages of ten and fourteen, children read book after book on travel, biography, and current events—goes to make up for deficiencies in the public schools. The Indian youth go back from school into homes that have dominant interests altogether different from those he has been taught at school. I have seen many a young man and woman bravely struggle to change home conditions in order to bring them into keeping with their training, and they have at last gone down! The father and the mother have never been accustomed, in the modern sense, to a competitive form of existence. The father has no trade or vocation. The value of a dollar, of time, of labor, is unknown in that home. The parents have not enough insight into educational values to appreciate the boy’s achievements and to inspire him further. What is to be done under such circumstances? In many cases the youth finds himself face to face with a shattered home. Bad marriage conditions, the very core of his social problem, stare him in the face. Many a young man and woman, realizing these home conditions, have gone away to establish homes of their own. As soon as the thrifty Indian accumulates a little property his relatives and tribesmen, in keeping with the old custom of communal ownership of property, come and live at his expense. There was virtual communal ownership of property in the old days under the unwritten laws of hospitality; but the omission, in these days, of that corresponding equal distribution of labor plays havoc with the homes of young Indians.
The Indian has his own labor problem. He has here a race inertia to overcome. The sort of labor he is called upon to do in these days is devoid of exploit. It is a change from sporadic effort to steady, routine labor calling for the qualities of self-control, patience, steady application, and a long look ahead. Shall he seek labor outside the reservation? Shall he work his own allotment? What bearing have his annuity money and his lease money on his labor problem? Do they stifle effort on his part? Do they make him content to eke out a living from year to year without labor? If he works, how is he to meet the ubiquitous grafter with his insistence upon chattel mortgages? How is he to avoid the maelstrom of credit into which so many have fallen?
The health problem of the Indian race may well engage the entire attention and life-work of many young Indian men and women. What about the seventy to eighty thousand Indians now suffering from trachoma? What about the thirty thousand tubercular Indians? Is this due to housing conditions?
There is also the legal problem. Is the Indian a ward of the Government, or a citizen? What are his rights and duties? His legal problem involves his land problem. Ought he to pay taxes? Will he ever secure his rights and be respected in the local courts unless he pays taxes? Is not this question most fundamental?
Shall the Indian youth ignore the problem of religion? Of the many religions on the reservation, which one shall energize his life? Shall it be the sun dance, the medicine lodge, the mescal, or the Christian religion? Shall he take in all religions, as so many do? What do these different religions stand for?
There is, finally, the whole problem of self-support. If he is to pursue agriculture he must study the physical environment and topography of his particular reservation, for these control, in a large measure, the fortunes of his people. If the reservation is mountainous, covered with timber, he must relate his studies to it. If it is a fertile plain, it means certain other studies. It involves the study of soils, of dry farming, irrigation, stock-farming, and sheep raising. The Indian must conquer nature if he is to achieve race adaptation.
My friends, here are problems of unusual difficulty. In the face of these larger problems—city, state, and national, as well as the Indian’s own peculiar race problems, and the two are inextricably interwoven—what shall be the Indian’s preparation to successfully meet them? What sort of an education must he have? Miss Kate Barnard has told us something of the problem as it exists in Oklahoma. Into this maelstrom of political chicanery, of the intrigue and corrupting influences of great vested interests, shall we send Indian youth with only an eighth-grade education? In vast sections of that Oklahoma country ninety per cent of the farms of white men were under mortgage last year. It means that even they, with their education and inheritance, are failing. Well might one rise up like Jeremiah of old and cry out, “My people perish for lack of knowledge”—knowledge of the truth as it exists in every department of life. This only can make us truly free.
The first effort, it seems to me, should be to give as many Indians as are able, all the education that the problems they face clearly indicate they should have. This means all the education the grammar schools, the secondary schools, and the colleges of the land can give them. This is not any too much for the final equipment of the leaders of the race. If we are to have leaders who will supply disciplined mental power in our race development, they cannot be merely grammar-school men. They must be trained to grapple with these economic, educational, political, religious, and social problems. They must be men who will take up the righteous cause among their people, interpret civilization to their people, and restore race confidence, race virility. Only by such leaders can race segregation be overcome. Real segregation of the Indian consists in segregation of thought and inequality of education.
We would not be so foolish as to demand a college education for every Indian child in the land, irrespective of mental powers and dominant vocational interests; but, on the other hand, we do not want to make the mistake of advocating a system of education adapted only to the average Indian child. If every person in the United States had only an eighth-grade education with which to wrestle with the problems of life and of the nation, this country would be in a bad way. We would accelerate the pace in the Government grammar schools of such Indian youth as show a capacity for more rapid progress. For the Indian of exceptional ability, who wishes to lay his hand upon the more serious problems of our race, the industrial work, however valuable in itself, necessarily retards him in the grammar school until he is man-grown. He cannot afford to wait until he is twenty-five to enter the high school. This system is resulting in an absolute block upon the entrance of our ablest young people into the schools and colleges of the land which stand open to them. There are hundreds of the youth of Oriental and other native races in our colleges. As an Indian it is impossible for me to believe that the fact that there are almost no Indians under such training today is due to a failure of my race in mental ability. The difficulty lies in the system rather than in the race. According to the census of the last decade, there were 300,000 college men and women to 90,000,000 of people in the United States, or 1 to every 300. In the same proportion there should be 1000 college Indian men and women in the United States, taking as our total population 300,000, or 1 in 300. Allowing for racial handicaps let us say there should be at least 500 instead of 1000 Indian college men and women. Actually there is not 1 in 30,000, and most of these escaped in early life the retarding process in the Government schools.
This is not in any way disparaging to the so-called industrial education in the Government Indian grammar schools, such as Carlisle, Haskell, Chilocco. Education that seeks to lead the Indians into outdoor vocational pursuits is most necessary. Our Government Indian Bureau feels the need for vocational training among the Indians, and I am very glad that it does. Productive skill we must have if we are to live on in this competitive age.
Others before me, such as Dr. Walter C. Roe, have dreamed of founding a Christian, educational institution for developing strong, native, Christian leadership for the Indians of the United States.1 I, too, have dreamed. For, after all, it is Christian education that is going to solve these great problems confronting the Indian. Such an institution must recognize the principle that man cannot live by bread alone, and yet at the same time show the dignity and divineness of toil by the sweat of one’s brow. The school must teach self-support. The Indian himself must rise up and do for himself, with the help of Almighty God. It must be Christian education because every problem that confronts us is, in the last analysis, a moral problem. In the words of Sumner, “Capital is another word for self-denial.” The gift of millions for Indian education is the people’s self-denial. Into whatever activity we may enter for life work, we must pay the price of self-control if we are to achieve any degree of success. The moral qualities, therefore, are necessary for our successful advance. Where shall we look for our final authority in these moral questions? We must look to nothing this side of the “Great Spirit” for our final authority. Having, then, brought into the forefront of the Indian race men of sound morality, intellectual grasp, and productive skill, we shall have leaders who are like the great oak tree on the hill. Storm after storm may break upon them, but they will stand, because they are deeply rooted and the texture of their souls is strong.2