196 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



certain more or less artificial conditions of education and 

 deportment.^ 



French Canada assumed from the outset that the gap be- 

 tween the Indian and the Frenchman was the chasm between 

 a primitive and advanced culture which only the slow process 

 of time could bridge — it seemed to recall the ages which had 

 been necessary for the Frenchman himself to come up from a 

 like aboriginal condition. At any rate what the Catholic pioneers 

 of New France saw in the Indian and what their successors still 

 see is that the Indian has a soul to save. To bring him to adjust 

 his natural religion to the more adequate conceptions of Catholicism 

 was the purpose of the majestic and sublime sacrifices which so 

 brilliantly illumine the pages of the old regime. No judicial mind 

 can contemplate the results of Catholic and Protestant missionary 

 endeavor among the American Indians and avoid the conclusion 

 that the Catholic Indians have on the whole preserved their 

 physical aboriginal type in greater perfection, have kept much of 

 their tribal culture, possess a deeper religious conviction. Among" 

 the Protestant Indians there are many instances of individual 

 attainment of noteworthy excellence in education, public useful- 

 ness and personal uprightness, but it is perfectly evident that the 

 term Protestant as applied in some of the Indian tribes does not 

 mean Christianized, so much as it implies an avowal and allegiance 

 to a given form of religious worship, and in many cases, little else. 

 My own personal observation is restricted to neither class, and I 

 believe there is good reason for saying that, broadly, in matters of 

 faith the Catholic Indian is a Catholic while the Protestant Indian 

 is an Indian. It is an important fact in its historical bearings that 

 the tribes which have been subjected to the most direct and per- 

 sistent Protestant effort have never fully surrendered their natural 

 religion. Indeed among the Iroquois of New York and Canada 

 there are two very distinct interests in the League represented by 

 the " Christians " and the " pagans." - So far as my knowledge 

 goes, this is not at all the condition among tribes acknowledging" 

 allegiance to the Catholic church. 



1 In the condition of the Six Nations Indians in Canada and New York, 

 there is a contrast, cither creditable to the one government or discreditable 

 to the other. Canada has let its Iroquois work out their own salvation and' 

 these Indians today are well educated, energetic, aggressive and fairly 

 prosperous. In New York the reports of 1910 show that more than one- 

 third (35.5 per cent) are illiterate. 



2 The Canadian Oneidas have now gone back to paganism after years of 

 Protestant missionary labors. 



