Native-born

“ To be sure, some of the wealthy, who in early childhood were sent to England to be educated there, and who spent there perhaps the greater part of their lives, may have preserved the native vigor of their race; but I refer to the multitude born on West Indian soil, and their children who had continually inhabited it. Have they not become a race, if possible, as miserable as that mixed element which is acknowledged as the indigenous one of the American tropics? You will find that fact confirmed by every intelligent traveller. ”

“ As registration reports generally return the births of the foreign population in the same tables with the American, and as the term native is applied to all infants whose parents were born in this country, though of foreign descent, it will be at once seen how difficult it is to obtain the exact birth-rate separate of each class. ”

“ We find on comparison that a far greater proportion of the delinquent classes are found among the inhabitants of foreign birth than among those of native ancestry, and even those born in this country of alien parents furnish a larger ratio to these classes than those of purely American parentage. ”

“ All bound to fight for the little things we care about
With the weight of a six-fold blow!
By the might of our cable-tow (Take hands!) ,
From the Orkneys to the Horn,
All round the world (and a little loop to pull it by) ,
All round the world (and a little strap to buckle it) ,
A health to the Native-born!
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1928.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1936, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 86 years or less. ”

“ An Indian tribe is composed of a number of kinship groups or clans. To each one of these, speaking generally, belongs the hereditary duty of performing a certain rite and also the care of the sacred objects connected with that rite. Each kinship group or clan has a set of personal names, all of which refer to the rite peculiar to the clan, or to the sacred objects or to the symbols connected with the rite, and one of these names is given to each person born within the clan. ”

“ The most powerful charms are parts of the bodies of still-born children; for, as they have been unable to do any harm in the world, every part of them is, in the native view, calculated to have a beneficent influence. ”

“ Among others, several days after the birth of a male child, the men visit the house, feel each limb of the newly born, exhort him to be brave, and finally give him a name; women perform similar ceremonies with female children. ”

“ We think the supposition that the Red man is a primitive type of a family of the human race, originally planted in the Western Continent, presents the most natural solution of the problem; and that the researches of physiologists, antiquaries, philologists and philosophers in general, tend irresistibly to this conclusion.”—Norman’s Rambles in Yucatan, p. 251, New York, 1843, 8vo. “My own belief is that, whatever was the origin of the different tribes or families, the whole race of American Indians are native and indigenous to the soil. ”

“ The first Christian convert from the heathen tribes is to receive the baptismal vow. And that convert is the young daughter of their king. The first lamb led by the hand of young Virginia to the fold of the Great Shepherd, approaches timidly, and with tears, the simple font hewn from the oak of her native forests. Near her is her favorite and noble-hearted brother, while an elder sister, clasping her infant son to her bosom, regards with intense curiosity a deed, to their comprehension so wrapped in mystery. ”

“ To the circumstances therefore in which they are placed, and not to any mental inferiority, are we to attribute the present condition of the native tribes. It is impossible to become acquainted with these children of nature without feeling the most sincere esteem for them and a deep interest in their impending fate. ”

“ With regard to descent, when a tribe is divided into two exogamous classes, the children are always born into the class either of their father or of their mother, the custom in this respect varying in different tribes; for in some tribes the children always belong to their father's class, and in others they always belong to their mother's. ”

“ The parents are very lenient to their children, and pass over every impertinence; they get small thanks for their kindness, and the boys, especially, often treat their mothers very badly. The natives’ fondness for children makes them very good nurses, and it is a source of the greatest pride to a native boy to take care of a white child. ”

“ Even the descendant of the aboriginal possessors of America had been made to abandon the habits and opinions of his progenitors, to become a wanderer on that element which had laved the shores of his native land for ages, without exciting a wish to penetrate its mysteries in the bosoms of his simple-minded ancestry. ”

“ It is painful to turn from reviewing the progress of the European population and their descendants established in this portion of America, to contemplate the condition and prospects of the aboriginal tribes. It cannot, I fear, be affirmed with truth, that the difficult problem of reconciling the interests of an inferior and native race with those of an intrusive and superior one, has as yet been satisfactorily solved on this continent. ”

“ The half-breeds also retain much of the reserved and unimpressible manner of the Indian; though a good deal of intercourse with the native race has led me to the conclusion that this is more of an acquired habit than a strictly hereditary trait: a piece of Indian education akin to certain habits of social life universally inculcated among ourselves. ”

“ To the Sons of the Golden South (Stand up!) ,
And the life we live and know,
Let a fellow sing o' the little things he cares about,
If a fellow fights for the little things he cares about
With the weight of a single blow! ”

“ It is observed also that while native whites of foreign or mixed parentage have a comparatively great length of life and a comparatively low birth rate, their children, who fall in the class of native whites of native parentage, have shorter lives and tend to produce larger families, than did the parents. ”

“ Such a female population could not grow up in a young colony, with the wonted preponderance of males, and leave no traces in subsequent generations.
Seeing, then, that the meeting of two types of humanity so essentially distinct as the European and the native Indian of America, has, for upwards of three centuries, led to the production of a hybrid race, it becomes an interesting question, what has been the ultimate result? Has the mixed breed proved infertile, and so disappeared; has it perpetuated a new and permanent type of intermediate characteristics ”

“ I have been told that many Indian tribes name a child from the greatest event in the life of its oldest living relative. When the child reaches maturity, he earns a name for himself by some characteristic achievement, goaded to it, no doubt, by the horrors of his given name. ”

“ Let a child of European parents be brought at birth into an Indian wigwam, and grow up among Indians only; and his life in all its parts will be Indian—his food, his occupations, his amusements, his knowledge, and his beliefs—and, along with the rest, his language also; while the African, for instance, born and bred in an American community, shows in all these same respects accordance with that particular class of Americans among whom his lot is cast. ”

“ In this confined, hot, and often enough dirty receptacle, they sleep, wake or dream, while the mother wields the heavy pestle, pounding the maize in the mortar, or grinds the meal on the stone, while she breaks the ground for sowing, hoes up the weeds or gathers in the crops, while she carries the heavy earthen water-jar on her head from the distant spring, and while, as now, she sways to and fro in the dance. No wonder if, under such circumstances, the native baby is thoroughly familiar with the national step and rhythm even before he has left the carrying-cloth and the maternal breast. ”

“ Under these circumstances, of course, I cannot say how the little native girl actually grows up, and whether she enjoys anything even faintly resembling the happy childhood of our own loved ones—but nothing leads us to suppose that she does; though there is no question that the native shares in the universal instinct which inspires all parents with affection for their offspring; he feeds his children and protects them when they need protection; he rejoices when they thrive and mourns over their illness and death. ”

“ For the same reason, since the tribal blood and life is communicated through males, the birth and standing of the mother are of little importance, and children are, as has been seen, easily admitted to their father’s rank. ”

“ No doubt the individuals or families composing the house or gens were not all of kindred blood, for the Oriental custom of adoption, so frequent with our North American Indians, and with all people distributed into tribes, septs, or clans, obtained with the Romans. ”

“ In every case of extensive immigration, with the excess of males and chiefly of hardy young adventurers, the same result is inevitable. On the American continent it has already produced a numerous race of half-breeds, descendants of white and Indian parentage, apart from that other and not less interesting “coloured race,” now numbering upwards of six millions in the United States alone, the descendants of European and African parentage. In the older provinces of Canada, the remnants of the aboriginal Indian tribes have been gathered on suitable reserves ”

“ You cannot change a native after he has reached the age of puberty, but before that it is possible to mould him. When the quarter-caste home, in which there are now nearly 100 children, was started we had some trouble with the mothers. ”

“ A quieter, sweeter place for convalescents does not exist, and even the native patients, who are not, as a rule, great lovers of scenery, like to lie under the trees with their bandaged limbs and heads, staring dreamily into the green and blue and sunny world. ”

“ The difference in paternity is revealed in the offspring, but in both cases the half-breeds are a large race and robust, have greater powers of endurance than the pure Indians, and are intellectually their superiors. ”

“ These Indians—and I speak of them as they were before the higher civilization of the whites began to interfere with their primitive customs—made it their aim to have the arms and legs of their children develop straight and shapely, even to the extent of binding the legs of the child together during its sleep if it were necessary to do so to constrain a correct growth of those members. ”

“ It is necessary to point out at least a few of the aspects of this general problem, in order to make clear the significance of the evolutionary theory of human civilization.
The social organization of primitive tribes shows similar traits in many different parts of the world. Instead of counting descent in the way we do, many tribes consider the child as a member only of its mother’s family, and count blood-relationship only in the maternal line ”

“ The assertions made in so many works on Africa, as to the happiness of the native in early childhood, do not stand the test of reality. As soon as the mother gets up after her confinement, which she does very soon, the infant is put into the cloth which she ties on her back. ”

“ All the natives have beautiful hands and feet, and they show particularly well in these high-born little children. He would not eat anything in our house, and at the college servants of his own sect always come and feed him. ”

“ Another instance, the race origin of which one would like to ascertain, offers itself in the curious belief, that, when a child is born, it is one of the ancestors of the family come back to live again. Traces of this occur in Irish literature, namely, in one of the stories about Cúchulainn. ”

“ The principal object aimed at, under the general idea of the history and geography of the Aboriginal Race, is to furnish a general and standard reference-book, or short encyclopædia of topics relative to the entire race, alphabetically arranged. By the insertion of the name of each family of tribes, nation, sub-tribe, or important clan, the occasion will be presented of noticing the leading or characteristic events, in their history, numbers, government, religion, languages, arts or distinctive character. ”

“ The expectant parents conjointly bent all their efforts to the task of giving the new-comer the best they could gather from a long line of ancestors. A pregnant Indian woman would often choose one of the greatest characters of her family and tribe as a model for her child. ”

“ The birth of a white half-breed would be followed by the death of the Indian mother at the hands of her own people. The only persons of mixed breed among them are children of Indian fathers by negresses who have been adopted into the tribe. ”

“ The descendants of Brant and other distinguished native chiefs are still proud to claim their lineage, where the physical traces of such an ancestry would escape the eye of a common observer. Traces of Indian descent may be recognised among ladies of attractive refinement and intelligence, and with certain mental as well as physical traits which add to the charm of their society. ”

“ The natural way in which a tribe is formed is from a family or group, which in time increases and divides into many households, still recognizing one another as kindred, and this kinship is so thoroughly felt to be the tie of the whole tribe, that even when there has been a mixture of tribes, a common ancestor is often invented to make an imaginary bond of union.82
The gens, until a comparatively recent time in the history of the human race, was composed of a female ancestor, all her children and all the children of her daughters, but not of her sons. ”