Life on the Reservation; R. J. Rushdoony

FROM Wards of the Government As a missionary to the Indians, I find your warnings under scored by my daily experience. One of the surest conse quences of a government of "welfare" and '''security'' is the rapid decline and death of responsibility and character. Whatever the pre-reservation Indian was-and his faults were real-he was able to take care of himself and had a character becoming to his culture and religion. He was a responsible person. Today he is far from that. The wretched security he has had, beginning with the food and clothing dole of early years, designed to enforce the reser vation system and destroy Indian resistance, has sapped him of character. The average Indian knows that he can [49 ] gamble and drink away his earnings and still be sure that his house and land will remain his own; and, with his hunt ing rights, he can always eke out some kind of existence. Government men too often hamper and impede the man with initiative and character. This is because their program inevitably must be formulated in terms of the lowest com mon denominator, the weakest Indian. In addition, the provisions of the government for the "welfare" and "se curity" of the Indians remove the consequences from their sinning and irresponsibility. The result is a license to irre sponsibility, which all the touted government projects can not counteract.

And I believe the results would be no better for the best hundred or thousand persons selected from any society, after a generation or so of the same kind of "welfare" and "security" government. There are many men in the Indian Service who are sin cerely and earnestly trying· to improve the Indian's wel fare. They are, however, faced with this constant dilemma: All their zealous and patient efforts to help the Indian sim ply tend to become another crutch that the Indian depends on. Those Indians who have become progressive and in dependent apparently have done so because of personal and religious factors totally unrelated to the government program. [50 ] ISAIAH'S JOB blJ -A/be,ptJalJ If/ock ONE evening last autumn, I sat long hours with a European acquaintance while he expounded a politico-economic doctrine which seemed sound as a nut and in which I could find no defect. At the end, he said with great earnest ness: "1 have a mission to the masses. I feel that I am called to get the ear of the people. I shall devote the rest of my life to spreading my doctrine far and wide among the populace. What do you think?"