I sincerely think it is wrong in the
whites to take the gospel from the Indians, as they do in Marshpee,
by occupying their meeting-house, and receiving the benefit of the
missionary fund. I mean that the people about Cotuet and Marshpee go
to our house, and fill it, to our exclusion, without any charge; while
the Indians are enforced by the laws which deprive them of the use
of their own lands, to pay a heavy tax, from which they derive no
benefit. Is not depriving them of all means of mental culture the
worst of all robberies? Can it be wondered, that the Indians become
more and more degraded? I presume all honest people will regret that
such has been the case. It will be seen that both the missionaries and
their white followers, imbibed all the prejudices of the day, and by
disseminating them, hindered others from doing us good. This is no
excuse, however, for the government of this Commonwealth, whose duty
it was to see that its red children were not abused in this way. We
greatly fear that our white fathers did not much care about their
colored children in Marshpee. At any rate, it may be some satisfaction
to the philanthropists in the country to know how liberal they have
been to their poor dependants.

To begin--the Indians owe nothing to the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, or to the inhabitants of New England generally, for
religious instruction, excepting a single appropriation of
four hundred dollars, made in 1816 or 1818, for repairing their
Meeting-house. Four hundred dollars more were appropriated in 1831,
for the purposes of erecting two school houses; but not one cent for a
teacher.[6]

The way the Marshpees have supported a school hitherto, has been this.
Some of them have lived abroad among the whites, and have learned to
read and write, with perhaps some small smattering of arithmetic.
On returning to the tribe, they have taught others what they knew
themselves; receiving pay from those who had the means, and teaching
the rest gratuitously. At the same time they have been compelled to
support a preacher whom they did not wish to hear, and to pay, in one
way or other, to the amount of four hundred dollars _per annum_ to
white officers, for doing them injury and not good. Thus then, in one
hundred and forty years they have paid fifty-six thousand dollars to
the whites, out of their own funds, in obedience to the laws of the
Commonwealth. In return, the whites have given them one thousand in
labor and m