REPORT OF THE DIRECTOR I9II I95 



The interesting commemoration gives rise, in my mind, to reflec- 

 tions on a well-worn and ever present theme — the attitude of the 

 white master toward the Indian. Perhaps as a titular official of the 

 Iroquois League the writer may have had opportunity to acquire a 

 right to this expression: There is one perfectly evident infer- 

 ence from the apparent motives and the actual dealings of the 

 French and English cultures with their red allies, whether expressed 

 in provincial, state or federal attitude : the French would ever let 

 the red man be a red man; the English would make the red man 

 into a white man. That is the situation succinctly stated. It would 

 be just to go further and put the statement thus : that Canada would 

 let the red man develop along lines of least resistance, while 

 America has ever insisted and is still insisting on at once turning 

 the red man white. The problem has worked its way along further 

 in the older east than in the newer west. 



I fancy we may not ascribe to the founders of our governments 

 on either side the line any profound recognition of natural law, 

 but it has certainly so happened that French Canada and French 

 influences in Canada have been content to grant the fundamental 

 difference in culture and to leave the Indian to come up slowly 

 from his barbaric state under a spiritual rather than a civic impetus. 

 It is thus the natural law works — slowly, if effectively. A great 

 abyss in nature, profoundly divergent lines of culture meeting at 

 their start but standing wide apart at the extremes, can not be 

 jumped by legislative enactment. Lines of racial development, one 

 following far behind the other, can not be brought together by 

 the process of legislative stretching. The law that says red is 

 white has either a fool or a knave for its author. Just as little 

 can great monetary foundations designed to eft'ect immediate altera- 

 tions in the slow but orderly procedure of natural law — such as 

 the development of language or the establishment of universal 

 peace — escape the conditions which that law imposes. The su- 

 premacy of a law which lies above the statute and the common law 

 is a fact which statute makers and statesmen have been slow to 

 learn; experience is full witness to this. The English attitude 

 toward the American Indian has never once suggested the conces- 

 sion that the Indian has just as much right on this earth as he, and 

 has played just as significant a part in human progress. To the Eng- 

 lish colonists and the ideas they have left alive, the red man is a 

 potential citizen as soon as he can he forced to measure up to 



