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Show Different Viewpoints on Vexed Question I picked up a copy of "Pageant" from the newsstand news-stand and was very much interested in the article by John Collier, U. S. Indian Commissioner on our treatment of the Indian. He reviewed the record briefly, but impartially, touching the highlights of our infamous behavior, with Indians in the far east down to Fall's inception of the plan to do 'em out of their eye teeth and then Fall broke on the Tea Pot Dome scandal, and we oame to. There isn't a word in the article that I don't believe, believe fully, and without reservation. To me it is the record. Then I picked up a copy of Collier's, and the Indian In-dian matter was presented in an entirely different vein, which on casual reading would pass with the uniformed, because it leaves out so much. And in that presentation, its author would infer that we all were the cat's kittens in honor, fairly dripping integrity integ-rity from our chin whiskers after we'd eaten the canary. Yes dripping integrity, but the lands, the territory of the Indians, gobbled up even to the tail feathers. Collier mentions Helen Hunt Jackson's volume, "A Century of Dishonor," in which all our wrongs were categoried and set down not nice reading, for truth is never nice if against us. Then the cause of the Indian was championed by one after another, until now, thank God, the Indian can have his religion without interference, can cling to the ways of his fathers even to letting his hair grow long if he wants to, without Washingtonia throwing a directive against it. A long time in coming. If ever there was a course of action that was disgraceful, dis-graceful, it was our conduct toward the Indians and yet we levy armies to see that a fascist brute, or a nazi inhuman shall not do the same things to popu: lations they wish to push aside. In one single week, two opposite versions of the same story and boih true? One is wrong. It reminds me of the little colored girl who ran home crying after a particularly harrowing experience exper-ience at the hand of the whites, to fall on her knees in prayer "O God, when he's born again, make him colored." No greater punshiment could be imagined. |