THE “WHITE-MAN” CURSE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 7, 1895

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 21, No. 44.

THE “WHITE-MAN” CURSE.

Bishop Whipple, of Dakota, who has done such a noble work among the Sioux Indians, recently said to a reporter: “The Indian is proverbially honest, unless he is demoralized by drink. In thirty-six years’ experience with the Indians, I never knew one to tell me a lie, and I never had a thing stolen by one. I asked an Indian once if it was safe to leave my property in my wigwam while I made a distant journey. He laughed and said: ‘Quite safe. There isn’t a white man within one hundred miles of you.’”—N. Y. Observer.

The bishop might have added that the Indian women were proverbially virtuous until the advent of the white man in their midst. The white-man curse is the worst evil that the poor aborigines of all countries, and the Christian missionaries sent to reclaim them, have had to contend with. And what makes it worse is that these white men, with all their evil influences, are representatives of the so-called “Christian nations,” and the natives regard them as Christians.