[Group of Five Pamphlets from the Dakota Mission Press]

[Santee, Ne, 1904. Very good.. Five pamphlets: 8; 4; 4; 4; 4pp. Each printed on a single sheet, only one folded. Small stain and small area of adhered paper remnants to one pamphlet, others clean. A collection of five small pamphlets printed on the mission press at the Santee Normal Training School on the Santee Reservation in northeastern Nebraska, on the banks of the Missouri River. The Santee Normal Training School was established in 1870 and operated until 1937. Alfred L. Riggs (1837-1916), the founder and principal of the school as well as editor and publisher of the school's newspaper, was a missionary and advocate of Native American education whose goal was to cultivate Native American teachers from among the tribes. The present pamphlets include the text of a speech given by Riggs in 1904, entitled Our Indian Missions, Seventy Years Review, 1834-1904. Riggs delivered the address before the National Council in Des Moines, Iowa. In his address, Riggs enumerates the changes among Native Americans in the previous seven decades: "The Fur Trade is gone.... The savage Indian is gone.... The Indian has changed.... The most significant proof of change is in the 44,000 who are church members." Riggs also details the history of missionary activities that have helped effect these changes. OCLC records eight copies of this address.

The remaining four pamphlets were written by Dora B. Dodge, a teacher from Brooklyn working at the Santee Normal Training School. These works were likely published around the time of Riggs' address, when Dodge was teaching at Santee, and after she had taught at other mission schools in the Dakotas, experiences which informed her works here on the Dakotas and Lakota. The titles include The Christian Indian and Civilization; The Religion of the Dakotas; Lakota Land; and The Indian at Home. Dodge grounds each work in personal experience, using the first person point of view in the first work, and writing in detail about the interaction of missionaries and Native American men and women throughout the four works. Dodge's works are also interesting as artifacts of the printing trade at Santee, as all four of them are unfolded, much as they would have come off the press. OCLC records just three copies of each work, at Yale, Princeton, and the British Library (except for the latter work, present only at Yale and Princeton).