by Jacob Abbott
The Kennebec Indian and His Child
Nothing can illustrate in a more touching manner the influence of this feeling than the story of the Kennebec Indian and his dead child. The tribe to which this poor man belonged lived on the banks of the Kennebec, in Maine, and when the State passed into the occupancy of white men, it became nearly or quite extinct. One man of the tribe who still remained, so recommended himself by his good behavior, and by his evident desire to adopt the habits of civilized life, that he received a grant of land from the State, in a certain township, and he settled upon this land with his wife and child, while the other farms in the neighborhood were settled by whites.
The Indian was treated fairly enough by his neighbors in their ordinary dealings with him, but still he was an Indian in their view, and they felt no cordial sympathy with him or his family. They did not admit him to any intimate relations with them, or regard him with the kind and friendly feeling which they entertained for each other.
At length his child fell sick and died. The neighbors did not come to see the family in their distress, and the poor Indian buried his child alone.
Not long afterward he went to some of his neighbors, and said to them in his broken language as follows:
“When white man's child dies, Indian man be sorry. He help bury him. When my child die, no one speak to me. I make his grave alone. I can't no live here any longer.”
He gave up his farm, dug up the body of his child, and carried it away with him, two hundred miles through the woods, to Canada, and joined a tribe of Indians living there, to share with them, for the rest of his days, the hardships and privations of barbarism.
The Feeling of Repulsion That Exists Between the Different Races of Man Not Necessarily a Prejudice
That peculiar feeling of repulsion which is seen universally in operation between the different races of men, and makes them mutually disinclined to live together in intimate domestic and social relations, is not, as is sometimes supposed, necessarily a prejudice. It results, as has already been intimated, from a wise and beneficent law of nature--one in universal operation throughout the whole animal world--the object of which is to preserve the distinction of species, and to maintain the purity, and secure the advancement, of the higher and nobler races of men. It is an instinctive principle implanted in the nature of every living being which draws him from those that are unlike himself in their physical conformation, and toward those that resemble him. In species that are entirely distinct from each other the aversion to domestic union is unconquerable. In the case of varieties, like those seen in the different races of men, the repulsive instinct by means of which nature intends to keep them separate from each other, in respect to the propagation of their kind, is less strong, but it is none the less real, and the design with which it has been implanted is beneficent in the highest degree. Thus the amalgamation of the Indian race with the Caucasian race coming to the new world from Europe, would have been against nature, and the instinctive principle, both in the heart of the Indian and of the white man, which leads each to love, and to seek domestic and social union with, those of their own race, and to avoid such union with those of the other, was one wisely implanted in the heart by the great author of nature, and one which both races were accordingly bound to obey.
The Universal Brotherhood of Man
These views, which it would seem impossible to gainsay, do not at all conflict with the sublime doctrine which the Christian religion teaches us, of the universal brotherhood of man, and the obligation which rests upon us all to regard every human being with sentiments of cordial and honest good will. They do not in the least excuse the acts of injustice and cruelty which have been perpetrated so extensively upon the Indian tribes during the last two hundred years, in consequence of which the gradual displacement of the old race by the new, which might have proceeded quietly, peacefully, and without individual suffering, has been hurried onward with so much violence and wrong. Let us hope, however, that the period of this injustice is now over, and that the ancient race, though its days are numbered and are fast passing away, may be cheered in its decline by the kind and friendly regards of those that are to succeed to its heritage, and thus be permitted to spend the remainder of its old age in happiness and peace.
The End.
