Page:The Indian Dispossessed.pdf/311

 CONCLUSION

ERE is the spectacle: a government founded on the principle of equal rights to all men, securing to its own citizens equality of opportunity and fair play, while it persistently denies both to the Indian. The people earnestly desire justice for the Indian—of this there is no question. Congress is made up of the people's representatives, and Congress, ignoring the general sentiment, has from 1789 to 1904 persistently, steadily borne down upon the Indian in the interest of the few in the Indian country.

Curiously enough, each individual writer of Indian history sees the short cut to reform through an appeal to the American people.

Bishop Whipple of Minnesota, who gave the best part of his life to the Indian cause, declared, after recounting the acts of broken faith which led up to the great Sioux massacre of 1863, "I submit to every man the question whether the time has not come for a nation to hear the cry of wrong, if not for the sake of the heathen, for the sake of the memory of our friends whose bones are bleaching on our prairies." This bookful of wrongs, and volumes more, have been perpetrated since. 288