If the government of Massachusetts do not see fit to believe me, I would fain propose to them a test of the soundness of my reasoning.  Let them put our white neighbors in Barnstable County under the guardianship of a Board of Overseers, and give them no privileges other than have been allowed to the poor, despised Indians.  Let them inflict upon the said whites a preacher whom they neither love nor respect, and do not wish to hear.  Let them, in short, be treated just as the Marshpee tribe have been, I think there will soon be a declension of morals and population.  We shall see if they will be able to build up a town in such circumstances.  Any enterprising men who may be among them will soon seek another home and society, which it is not in the power of the Indians to do, on account of their color.  Could they have been received and treated by the world as other people are, there would not be so many living in Marshpee as there are by half.

The laws were calculated to drive the tribe from their possessions, and annihilate them, as a people; and I presume they would work the same effect upon any other people; for human nature is the same under skins of all colors.  Degradation is degradation, all the world over.

If the white man desired the welfare of his red brethren, why did he not give them schools?  Why has not the State done something to supply us with teachers and places of instruction?  I trow, all the schooling the Marshpee people have ever had, they have gotten themselves.  There was not even a house on the plantation for the accommodation of a teacher, till I arrived among them.  We have now a house respectable enough for even a white teacher to lodge in comfortably, and we are in strong hopes that we shall one day soon be able to provide for our own wants, if the whites will only permit us to do so, as they never have done yet.  If they can but be convinced that we are human beings, I trust they will be our hindrance no longer.

I beg the reader’s patience and attention to a few general remarks.  It is a sorrowful truth that, heretofore, all legislation regarding the affairs of Indians, has had a direct tendency to degrade them, to drive them from their homes, and the graves of their fathers, and to give their lands as a spoil to the general government, or to the several States.  In New England, especially, it can be proved that Indian lands have been taken to support schools for the whites, and the preaching of the gospel to them.  Had the property so taken been applied to the benefit of its true owners, they would not and could not have been so ignorant and degraded a race as they now are; only forty-four of whom, out of four or five hundred, can write their names.  From what I have been able to learn from the public prints and other sources, the amount annually derived to the American people, from Indian lands is not far from six millions, a tax of which they have almost the sole benefit.  In the mean while, we daily see the Indian driven farther and farther by inhuman legislation and wars, and all to enrich a people who call themselves Christians, and are governed by laws derived from the moral and pious puritans.  I say that, from the year of our Lord 1656, to the present day, the conduct of the whites toward the Indians has been one continued system of robbery.