Page:U.S. Department of the Interior Annual Report 1881.djvu/7

Rh to live upon food furnished by the labor of others to earning their food by their own labor—a preference which is perhaps shared with them by some white men. This is not true, however, of all Indians. Many individuals of some of the tribes are willing to work, and are working, under difficulties, but it still remains true that many others are content to be and will remain mere paupers.

The other difficulty in the way of making the Indians self-supporting is that we have not given them a fair chance to become so. The titles of the Indians to most of their reservations, perhaps to all of them except those in the Indian Territory, are not such as the courts are bound to protect. They are compelled to rely largely, if not entirely, upon the executive and legislative departments of the government. The reservations set apart by treaty, or law, or executive order, have been usually many times larger than necessary (if cultivated) for the support of the tribes placed thereon. Our people, in their march westward, have surrounded these reservations, and seeing in them large tracts of fertile land withheld from the purpose for which they believe it was intended—cultivation—have called upon the executive and legislative departments to make new treaties, new laws, and new orders, and these calls have generally been heeded. Now, it is clear that no Indian will with good heart engage in making and improving a farm with the knowledge or the prospect that after he has so done he may at any time be required to leave it and "move on." In the case of the Indian, he may have the privilege of keeping his home if he will sever the ties of kinship and remain behind his tribe: but few do this. I wish to emphasize the point that we are asking too much of the Indian when we ask him to build up a farm in the timber or on the prairie, with the belief that at some future time he will be compelled to choose between abandoning the fruits of his labor, or his kindred and tribe. White men would not do so, and we should not ask Indians to do so.

I therefore earnestly recommend two things, in case the present number of reservations shall be maintained: First, that existing reservations, where entirely out of proportion to the number of Indians thereon, be, with the consent of the Indians, and upon just and fair terms, reduced to proper size; and, second, that the titles to these diminished reserves be placed by patent as fully under the protection of the courts as are the titles of all others of our people to their land. I would not, in reducing the reservations, so reduce them as to leave to the Indians only an area that would suffice for an equal number of whites. Their attachment to kin and tribe is stronger than among civilized men, and I would so arrange that the Indian father of to-day might have assurance that his children as well as himself could have a home. I would also provide in the patent for the reservations that so long as the title to any portion of the reservation remained in the tribe, adult Indians of the tribe who would locate upon and improve particular parcels of the reservation, should have an absolute title to the parcels so improved by