16
THE
C H IM A W A
AM ERICAN
N O T A M O N G O L IA N
The American Indian should not be classified as a Mongolian. This
is the belief of Cato Sells, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, after personal
investigation and consultation with Dr. F, W. Hodge, Ethnologist in
Charge of the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institu
tion at Washington.
Certain recent writers, in an effort to reduce the number of races into
which man is divided, have shown a disposition to do away with the old
classification of the Indian or Red Man as a distinct race, and to classify
him as a member of the Mongolian family.
Instructions prohibiting the teaching of the classification in Indian
schools which places the Indian in the Mongolian family will be issued
by Commissioner Sells, and all school books containing such classifica
tion will be dropped from the authorized list of books in use in the In
dian Service.
.
Commissioner Sells says that he Is advised by the best authority that
the Indians are classed by anthropologists as a distinct race commonly
designated as the Red Race, or as Red Men, in contradistinction to the
White (Caucasian), Yellow (Mongolian), Brown (Malay) and Black
(Negro) races of people, and that he proposes to do everything in his
power to oppose the arbitrary classification advanced by a few publishers
of school books, which classes the Indian as Mongolian.