History on Indian Reservations -- nowhere

[ Show ]

Support VoyForums

[ Shrink ]

VoyForums Announcement: Programming and providing support for this service has been a labor of love since 1997. We are one of the few services online who values our users' privacy, and have never sold your information. We have even fought hard to defend your privacy in legal cases; however, we've done it with almost no financial support -- paying out of pocket to continue providing the service. Due to the issues imposed on us by advertisers, we also stopped hosting most ads on the forums many years ago. We hope you appreciate our efforts.

Show your support by donating any amount. (Note: We are still technically a for-profit company, so your contribution is not tax-deductible.) PayPal Acct: Feedback:

Donate to VoyForums (PayPal):

[ Login ] [ Contact Forum Admin ] [ Main index ] [ Post a new message ] [ Search | Check update time ]

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]

Date Posted: 06:33:21 11/13/09 Fri
Author: Eagle (For your Information)
Subject: History on Indian Reservations

In canyon, plain, badland and forest, the author of this appraisal of Indian affairs under John Collier's New Deal administration has sought an answer to one of the most baffling questions in our history: What is the destiny of the First Americans; how can they achieve it?

Whither the American Indian?
by ALDEN STEVENS

1. SIX YEARS AGO A TRIBE OF 700 INDIANS IN SOUTHERN New Mexico camped around the government agency, living in dilapidated tents, brush tepees, board shacks. Like hungry sparrows hoping for a crust of bread, these once proud people depended on their harassed agent to keep them somehow from starvation. What resources the tribe once owned had been dissipated in per capita payments, ill-advised loans which could never be repaid, care and training of the children which served only to male the younger generation as helpless and hopeless as the older.
2. Living on a reservation rich in natural resources and potentialities, they had never been taught or allowed to manage their own affairs. Instead, the Indian Bureau had handled�and mishandled�everything for them. Inevitably this tribe, lacking education, lacking any opportunities to become self-sufficient, bereft of all responsibility and not permitted to work out any small part of their own destiny, had become shiftless hangers-on at the agency, diseased, discouraged, broken in spirit.
3. Today many of the same people live in clean, comfortable homes; the children live with the parents and attend schools on the reservation, which prepare them for the problems they will face as adults. Their herds are sleek and fat�in 1937 the cattle income of the tribe was $101,000; the feed produced was worth more than $40,000. No longer are they discouraged and spiritless. NOW the tribe cares for its own old and indigent; the able-bodied care for themselves better than they have been able to do in many decades. This tribe, the Mescalero Apache, has come back. And there is no reason why the new order should not be permanent. They were fortunate in the natural resources available and in having an able superintendent to aid and advise them. But the reconstruction is their own doing, and other tribes less well equipped have also taken advantage of the same new devices with impressive results.
A Century and a Half of Dishonor
4. SINCE THE BEGINNING OF WHITE OCCUPATION OF THE North American continent the Indian has been trampled upon and exploited. Treaties have been made and violated; tribes deprived of their land, their living, their customs and religion. In 1838 the Cherokees were mercilessly driven westward from their homes in North Carolina and Georgia clear across the Mississippi. A few hid out in the mountains, but only a few. It was winter, and the soldiers who drove them cared little whether they lived or died. The best thing was to get rid of them anyway. One third of the tribe was buried or left to rot along the way.
5. At about the same time. on the western plain, the fur trading posts systematically debauched the Indians with cheap liquor, cheated them of their furs and sometimes of their land. Did a tribe rebel? Soldiers came quickly and taught them their place. Usually their place was underground.
6. Every effort was made, over a long period of time, to get rid of the Indian; to kill him off, starve him and discourage him into race suicide, in an effort to solve the Indian problem by eliminating the Indian. It didn't work, and today the Indian is actually gaining in numbers at a rate faster than that of the white population of the United States.
7. When Helen Hunt Jackson wrote "A Century of Dishonor" in 1881, the fashion of making treaties with tribes, and then conveniently breaking them by writing new ones, had just been abandoned. The book tells a long story of broken promises, systematic destruction and de. moralization, exploitation by traders, railroad companies and politicians. How much the book had to do with it is hard to say, but shortly after it was published a new Indian policy came into effect, based on the land needs of the tribes. This was urged by Carl Schurz and approved by Helen Hunt Jackson and other good friends of the Indian. It was recognized that ruthless destruction must stop. Instead, the Indian should be assimilated, gradually losing his identity until he became indistinguishable from a white man. This done successfully, the Indian problem would disappear, for certainly the Indian was dying out at that time�or being killed off; and Indian culture could not possibly last more than a few years, anyway. As a matter of fact little was said about Indian culture, the general feeling being that there wasn't any.
8. The General Allotment Act was passed in 1887, and many people regarded it as the final solution of the Indian problem. Each Indian was to be given 40 to 160 acres of land, with the stipulation that it must not be sold for twenty-five years except with the consent of the government. Agents were supposed to give instruction in farming methods and help along a little during the first few years.
9. It is doubtful whether anyone suspected that this act would work out even one tenth as badly as it did. In the first place the Indians were expected to adapt themselves almost immediately to a completely new way of life. The very concept of land ownership by individuals was foreign. Few of the tribes had done any farming or were interested in doing any. The facilities for educating them to the new ways were pitifully inadequate.
10. When all the Indians on a reservation had received their allotments, the remainder of the land was thrown open for white settlement. Nobody thought this mattered very much, since the Indians were a dying race, anyway, and would never need the land, especially now that each had a nice farm of his own. The tribes lost 20 percent of all their land within two years. By 1933 they had lost 90 million of the 138 million acres they had when the act was passed�nearly two thirds. "Checkerboarding" of reservations, leaving blocks of Indian land completely surrounded by white holdings, led to the gradual break-up of tribal life without the substitution of any other kind of community life. Whites more often than not regarded the Indians as inferior, and almost never would the two cultures mix.
11. But probably the worst feature of the allotment act was its inheritance provision. On the death of the original allottee, the land was to be divided among his heirs. Why no one thought of the way this would work out is hard to say; maybe some legislators did think of it, but they didn't do anything. Indians sometimes live a long time, and when Charley Yellowtail dies at the age of ninety-nine, the number of heirs may be something little less than astronomical. Forty acres of land divided among, say, 120 heirs, gives each just about enough to pitch a teepee.
12. The Indian Bureau attempted to solve difficulty by renting and in some cases selling the entire parcel, and dividing the proceeds among the heirs. More often than not a white man was on the other end of the deal. The Indians were left landless, and the rental checks sometimes amounted to as little as two or three cents a year. Some Indians might have these microscopic shares in a dozen or more estates. The bookkeeping was about all the Indian Bureau had time to handle.
13. It was an impossible situation, of course, and quite insoluble under the allotment act. Fortunately for them, the act was never applied to some groups, such as the Pueblos in New Mexico, who retained their land as tribes and lost nothing through allotment.
A Decade of Progress
14. THE GROUNDWORK FOR A CHANGE WAS LAID in 1928, when Lewis Meriam and his associates published their Institute of Government Research report. "The Problems of Indian Administration." In this comprehensive and fundamental study, the failure of the assimilation policy was boldly drawn, and practical, specific recommendations were made. Under President Hoover, Charles Rhoads and Henry Scattergood administered the Indian Office and began making the government a helpful friend instead of a despotic manager. A good spirit of cooperation between the government and the Indians came about. New emphasis on day schools marked the beginning of a better educational policy. Tribal skepticism and the novelty of the approach slowed the work, but a new day had definitely begun.
15. John Collier became Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. For a number of years he had headed the militant Indian Defense Association, had saved the Pueblo lands from seizure by associates of Albert B. Fall by forcing the defeat of the anti-Indian Bursum bill, and had demonstrated his devotion to the Indian cause in many other ways.
16. Collier's plan was to make a clean sweep of the old ways and make it possible for Indians to live as Indians until a more natural and less destructive assimilation could come about. no matter how long this might cake. His first step was to get through a none-too-willing Congress the Wheeler-Howard bill, largely his own work, assisted by Nathan Margold and Felix Cohen, two Interior Department attorneys. In the end this emerged almost intact as the Indian Reorganization Act, and is the legal basis for Collier's program.
17. The act does not apply to any tribe which rejects it in an election, and though it does not appear that a tribe has anything to lose by accepting it, a considerable number have voted it down, including the Navajo. The administration frankly urges its adoption, sometimes with a fairly high pressure campaign, but there is no evidence of discrimination against those who reject it and nothing to cast suspicion on any of the elections. No tribe in the country has had a more comprehensive program of conservation work and general economic rehabilitation than the Navajo-but space is lacking for adequate discussion of this unique and particularly difficult situation.
Reorganization
18. THE ALLOTMENT POLICY IS ENDED, AND WHILE PRESENT HOLDINGS of individuals are not affected, no more allotments will be made. Indian owners of reservation land may now sell it, but only to the tribe, a provision which prevents further alienation of Indian land. Ceded lands which have neither been allotted nor settled by whites are returned to the tribe, and provision is made for small additions to Indian holdings where necessary. Management is by an elected tribal council, which (except where there is a shortage) assigns each member as much land as he can actually use. Thus one of the worst administrative headaches is on the way to a cure. and the shrinkage of Indian holdings is halted except for some of those tribes which have rejected the Reorganization Act. It is true that the problems of the checker-boarded reservations are not solved, and most of the old difficulties of rental and division of proceeds among heirs of allottees remain. But the new policy does turn land management back to the Indian; it goes far toward stabilization of the situation. and it seems to be working out well in most places.
19. No less important than the land provisions are the sections of the Reorganization Act enabling Indians to organize, adopt a constitution, and to incorporate. These give a measure of self-government greater than ever enjoyed before, though approval of the Secretary of the Interior is still required on many important matters. The constitutions are supposed to originate with the tribes, but government lawyers have usually helped frame them, and each must be approved by the Secretary before the tribe votes acceptance or rejection.
20. It is the Secretary of the Interior, too who issues a charter of incorporation when petitioned to do so. This also is subject to a vote on the reservation. Indians have never before had an opportunity to do much voting on what they wanted or didn't want. and not all tribes have taken kindly or intelligently to the democratic process thrust suddenly upon them under the New Deal. On some reservations, such as the Hopi, the idea of an all-tribal elected council is so foreign that many Indians simply do not recognize its authority and pay little attention to its activities. Poorly educated people commonly miss the full implications of an election and ignore it. After it is over, they may resent the powers acquired by the council members and regard them simply as government stooges.
21. Congress is authorized to appropriate $10 million as a revolving fund from which loans may be made to these chartered corporations for the purpose of promoting the economic development of the tribes. Repayments are credited to the revolving fund and are available for new loans. It was this fund which made possible the fresh start of the Mescalero Apache tribe. The record of collections on these loans has been very good.
22. About seventy-five of the tribal corporations are now functioning, with varying degrees of success, and the number continues to grow. The Jicarillas have bought their trading post and are running it; the Chippewas as run a tourist camp; the Northern Cheyennes have a very successful livestock cooperative: the Swinomish of Washington have a tribal fishing business. There are plenty of others to prove these corporations can be made to work
23. So far, however. it has shown up best where a small, close-knit group is involved, but less satisfactorily on such large reservations as those of the Sioux, where distances are great and there is a certain amount of mutual distrust and jealousy between communities. Smaller cooperatives, at least for the present, may be indicated. In the case of the Blackfeet, the tribal council, when elected, proved to be predominantly Indians of mixed blood, and the full bloods of the reservation, amounting to about 22 percent of the population, complained that their interests were being subordinated and neglected wherever they conflicted with those of the mixed bloods.
24. The election system was adjusted later to insure fair representation of the minority group. The difficulty about the system is that so many Indians on large reservations�and some on small�do not have a sense of common interest. The nine Hopi villages in Arizona have a long tradition of independent action as city states, with very little cooperation or friendly feeling between them. In other cases the desperately poor circumstances prevailing and the lack of resources to start with have caught tribes simply too run down and discouraged to put their shoulders to the wheel.
25. But all this new machinery gives Indians for the first time an opportunity to run their own affairs, to a limited extent it is true, but previously everything was handled by the government, and the Indians had to take it or leave it. Now a tribe, as a corporation, may purchase, operate and dispose of property, may hire counsel, engage in business enterprises of nearly any sort, and generally enjoy the legal privileges of a corporation. Management by the elected council is not always good, but at least it is management by Indians through democratic processes, and a nod of adjustment to the new way must be expected to produce mistakes and failures as well as successes. It has all been thrust upon the tribes very suddenly as such things go�too suddenly, say critics of the administration, and they may be right.
26. Indian families are definitely in the lower third of the American population, so far as income is concerned. The average for a family of four during 1937 was $600 or its equivalent in subsistence. Work relief and direct relief made up much too large a proportion of this. Only some of the families getting oil royalties and a very few others are in the tenth of the United States population with family incomes of more than $2500.
Indians at Work
27. About 40 PERCENT OF ALL INDIANS OVER TEN YEARS OLD ARE engaged for at least a part of the year in pursuits which bring in cash. Half of these are unskilled laborers, the other half do various types of semi-skilled and skilled work. Fishing brings in sizable amounts to some tribes in the Pacific Northwest. Lumbering is carried on in Oregon, Montana, Arizona, Wisconsin and other states. The sustained yield management of timber reserves now almost universally applied should insure an income indefinitely for the relatively small number of Indians with commercial forests. Nearly all Indians are farmers or stockbreeders, and as such raise at least a part of their own food supply. The cooperatives which are springing up all over the Indian country help with marketing and do much to improve farming methods and increase production of saleable crops.
28. A growing source of income has been the sale of arts and crafts. This has long brought in sizable sums to the southwest tribes, and everyone is familiar with Navajo blankets and jewelry and with Pueblo pottery. In fact, the popularity of these products has brought out a flood of inferior factory-made imitations which has hurt the sale of authentic items.
29. The Indian Arts and Crafts Board was set up by Congress in 1936 to give aid in marketing, and to keep up quality by setting standards for each type of object. Rene d'Harnoncourt, manager of the board, was responsible for the magnificent show of Indian products and Indian culture at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939, which was one of the really outstanding features of Treasure Island. New uses for Indian material in interior decoration were suggested to show the many attractive home furnishings, so thoroughly American, which Indians produce. The board is a promotional and advisory organization, working on a small budget. It has met opposition from traders and commercial firms�some of these are more friendly now�so that its influence is not yet widely felt. The publicity value of the exhibits at San Francisco, at Gallup, N.M., and elsewhere, together with marketing cooperatives the board has 'helped Indians establish on a number of reservations, has undoubtedly had a stimulating effect. Arts and crafts will never be one of the most important income sources except locally, but an increasing number of Indians are finding that there is money in it.
Homes and Health
30. HOUSING HAS BEEN FOR YEARS AS SERIOUS A PROBLEM ON THE Indian reservations as in city slums. Best housed are the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona, who escaped the destructive effects of the allotment act and early white penetration of their traditional homeland. Since they live in a mild climate, and have plenty of building materials�stone and adobe�they have managed well, and still do. On the plains it has been a different story. Nearly land: less, penniless, with no way to make a living, and no satisfactory natural building materials at hand, such tribes as the Sioux, Winnebago, Cheyenne and Arapaho have lived through the cold winters in dirt hovels, tarpaper shacks, ancient tents and other makeshift dwellings for many years.
31. The Mescalero and some of the plains tribes have accomplished a limited amount of rehousing with the aid of loans from the revolving fund set up under the Reorganization Act. Some Farm Security Administration money has been made available for housing planned by the Indian Office, most of the work being done by the Indians themselves. The general improvement in Indian income is reflected in repairs on old houses and in the building of some new ones by the Indians themselves. But it is still true, and will be for a long time, that these efforts merely scratch the surface. Indian housing remains woefully inadequate.
32. Health, so closely related to housing, is also still far from satisfactory, though probably better today than it has ever been before. Somewhat better food and shelter have made a difference, particularly in the greatest Indian scourge, tuberculosis. There is some indication that Indian resistance to disease is increasing, and certainly Indian resistance to white medicine is decreasing. When the new Navajo-Hopi health center was opened last year at Fort Defiance some of the prominent Navajo medicine men participated in the ceremonies with chants, speeches and offers of cooperation�evidence of an entirely new attitude toward the Indian Service, and one which has been brought about by the new attitude of the service itself toward the Indian.
33. Trachoma, a serious and persistent Indian disease, has been tackled with new vigor. Cooperative research with Columbia University at the Trachoma School on the Fort Apache Reservation in Arizona has definitely established the cause of trachoma as a filterable virus, and experiments with sulfanilamide give promise of an effective new treatment.
Educational About-Face
34. THE PROBLEM OF EDUCATION, SO VITAL TO THE SUCCESS OF any government program, has been a sore spot for more than a century, and the present administration has characteristically applied to it a fresh viewpoint; at the same time building on the work done by the previous administration under Commissioner Rhoads, who was one of the first to recognize the hopeless inadequacy of traditional policies.
35. The original colonies showed little concern for Indian education, although several colleges, including Dartmouth and Harvard, made provision for tuition-free admission of Indians, and the Continental Congress in 1775 employed a schoolmaster for the Delaware and made motions toward doing something for other tribes. The Revolution interrupted, and until 1819 Indian education was left entirely to a few missionary societies. From that year to 1873, $10,000 was appropriated annually for the work, and most of this was turned over to the missions. From 1873 on, the appropriations increased fairly regularly, until 1932, when $11,224,000 was set aside. The next few years saw slight reductions; the budget for 1939-1940 allow $10,523,745. (However, most post-1933 building was done with emerge funds not included in the departmental budget.) Until 1929, Indian education was pretty much a hodgepodge. More Indians attended public schools than other kind�this is still true. Large number were in mission schools. Many attended boarding schools both on and off the reservation These were established late in the last century when the accepted theory of Indian education called for remove the children from their parents and home life as much as possible so that they might be "civilized." Often the children were taken by force from their homes and subjected in the schools to a rigid discipline and a standardized, outmoded course of study. Half their time was devoted to school work, the other half to doing routine institutional tasks such as laundering, cleaning, wood-chopping and food preparation. Often this work was too hard and too many hours per day were devoted to it, so that it had a serious effect on health. Insufficient opera funds made the school and living standards dangerously low.
36. Forbidden to speak their own language in school, out of touch with family and tribal life, denied the normal experience and education needed to prepare them for life as Indians, the children would return home from school dissatisfied misfits, unable to readapt themselves to reservation life and equally unable to find a place in a white community. They had learned to read and write, but they were unfamiliar with the customs and language of own people, and found their schooling of little use in making a living.
37. The problem was a hard one, and perhaps the earlier officials should not be too harshly criticized for their failure to solve it. Indians are very diverse; they represent hundreds of cultures vastly different one from another. More than two hundred mutually unintelligible languages are spoken in the United States. The school program must be carefully fitted to each group since the needs vary so much. And undoubtedly the success of the present program rests partly on a study of previous failures.
38. The "about-face" in Indian education is designed to mesh with the "about-face" in general policy. Recognizing attempts to drag children from their families and "civilize" them as a total failure, the aim now is to give a basic education in the three R's without detaching them from their families, to teach hygiene and such mechanical skills as will be useful to each group. This is accomplished to an increasing extent in day schools, which are being established on as many reservations as possible. The children live at home and walk or ride to school. Native tongues are not forbidden, and an increasing number of Indians are on the teaching staffs. In the past ten years the Indian day school population (in all-Indian schools distinct from public schools) has risen from 4532 to 14,087. There are still over 10,000 in boarding schools on and off the reservations, and about 7000 in schools run by signs, states and private agencies.
39. The fact that facilities for education were so limited has made it impossible to abandon entirely the boarding schools, but the emphasis in these has been changed radically, and they are now used principally as vocational and trade schools. The boarding school at Flandreau, S.D., specializes in dairying; Haskell Institute (a high school) at Lawrence, Kan., gives business and commercial courses and shop work; that at Santa Fe, N.M., is for rents who wish to learn arts and crafts. Sherman Institute, at Riverside, Calif., teaches agriculture and industrial work. Thus it is possible for those who show aptitude and want training in trades to get it.
40. Some of these schools are accredited by higher institutions, and an educational loan fund of $250,000 enables young Indians to attend advanced trade and vocational schools as well as colleges. About 220 Indians are now receiving higher education, most of them in state universities.
41. Indian education is still much less complete than it should be. At least 10,000 children of school age are not oiled in any school. But never has an educational prom been so well adapted to the Indian's problem, and never have there been as many school-age children in school as there are today. The importance of education reflected in the fact that more than half the total staff the Office of Indian Affairs is engaged in this work.
42. Of 86,747 Indians between six and eighteen, 33,645 attend public schools not operated by the Office of Indian Affairs These are mostly in such states as California, Minnesota, and Oklahoma, where a certain fount of assimilation is actually taking place. The arrangement does not work badly; and some educators feel that Indian children who attend public schools are better adapted to meet their problems as adults for the contacts made there. Since Indian land is exempt from taxation, the government pays a small tuition to the school district for each Indian pupil.
43. For the first time adult Indians are taking a real interest the education of their children d in the possibilities of the fool as a community center. the Rosebud reservation (Sioux, S.D.) a vegetable canning project by the women with some help from the school teacher was so successful that for the first time in many years a winter was passed without relief rations being sent into the area. There is an awakening of interest which has resulted in some rather astonishing initiative on the part of the Indians. In the Kallihoma district of Oklahoma some twenty-five children were without school facilities, but their parents got together, bought an abandoned hotel, remodeled it themselves, set up an Indian and his wife as teachers, and started a day school and community center which has been a most successful enterprise.
The Indian Administration
44. NO DISCUSSION OF COLLIER S POLICIES WOULD BE COMPLETE without mention of an important trend within the Office of Indian Affairs. The Reorganization Act is designed to set up mechanisms within the tribe which will perform the social services now provided by the government bureau. The result should be a gradual withering of the bureau as the new tribal machinery takes over the load. This withering process cannot be said to have begun as yet, but perhaps that would be expecting too much. Complete elimination of the bureau cannot be accomplished for many years, if ever, and meanwhile Indians are being trained and encouraged to seek government positions in it. About half the employee today are Indians, and the proportion is increasing. Nearly a hundred are in the Washington office�there were eleven there in 1933�and not a few are in highly responsible positions. The rest are scattered over the country; many are teaching in the new schools. These men and women are getting valuable experience in public administration, and as the office decreases in size many of them will be prepared to step into tribal government and perform there the greatest possible service to their people.
45. Indian civil liberties are in better shape than ever, though still rather restricted. Indians are citizens, but in some states. for a variety of reasons. they do not vote. Early in 1934 Congress repealed twelve old laws limiting Indian freedom of meeting, organization and communication, authorizing the Indian office to remove "undesirable persons', from reservations, permitting rather arbitrary action by the superintendents and approving repressive military measures. It is true that most of these laws had not been in use for many years, but it is good that they have been repealed. Bans on the use of Indian languages by children in school and restrictions on native religious ceremonies have been lifted.
46. An improved system of administration of justice to Indians was deleted from the Wheeler-Howard bill before passage. However, the judicial power of the reservation superintendents, once almost unlimited, has been sharply reduced, and the government has much less control over individual lives and activities than it formerly had.
47. The administration has come in for its share of criticism, much of it aimed at the Navajo service. The Navajo range was in extremely bad condition even before 1933, and by that year it was obvious that strong action was necessary if there was going to be any range left. It is a complicated story with, no doubt, much to be said on both sides, but the net result has been that in drastically reducing the Indian stock and instituting controls aimed at saving the range from destruction by erosion, a great deal of opposition was stirred up. There were claims of injustice, arbitrary seizure and more or less dictatorial methods. The Navajos expressed their displeasure by rejecting the Indian Reorganization Act, though by a fairly close margin. Last fall, when 'drought swept the West and crops everywhere were bad, critics pointed out thee if the administration hadn't been in such a rush to cut down the number of horses and get rid of the goats, the Navajos could now be eating them. On the other hand, feed for the remaining animals had to be brought onto the reservation because of the lack of grass, and had even more been destroyed this would not have been necessary.
48. Many sober observers have charged that Collier's program has been jammed through much too fast, and that this speed has brought about more trouble and resentment than it was worth. The Indian Rights Association, which has worked tirelessly for Indians since 1882, points to the good work of the previous administration as proof that it is not necessary to go so fast, and that order progress following careful experiment may result in more permanent reform with less upsetting opposition. There is evidence that the pace has now slowed down.
49. The administration has been publicized masterfully�perhaps too much so. One might gather from reading Indian Office releases that the Indian had never had a friend before, and that now every problem of the red man has been solved, or is on its way to a quick solution. Nothing has stirred up as much antagonism in the Indian country as the driving passion for immediate and complete reform, the impatience with criticism and the too enthusiastic press notices which have been characteristic since Collier took over.
50. Other critics have called Collier visionary, and his policies communistic. Some say Indians do not want to and are not competent to govern themselves. Occasionally, on the other hand, we hear that Collier is a sentimentalist, trying to hold the Indian back for the benefit of tourists and anthropologists, to keep him out of the main stream of American life. These groups, however, apparently have nothing to suggest but a return to the old assimilation policy which gave no promise of success and every evidence of complete and tragic failure during the long years of its history. Then there are many individual complaints against superintendents, physicians and other officials. There always have been these, and there always will be. "Too much education and not enough practical experience," says one New Mexico observer about local Indian office employee.
51. THE TWO MOST IMPORTANT INDEPENDENT ORGANIZATIONS working for the good of the Indian are the Indian Rights Association and the American Association on Indian Affairs. Both are friendly to the administration, the latter perhaps more so than the former. Each makes reports and suggestions, publicizes Indian needs, investigates complaints, and points out individual cases of bad administration. Although the Indian Rights Association is in sympathy with most of Collier's broad aims, it has taken some pretty energetic pot-shots in the past, and still takes every opportunity to point out that while good work is being done, there is still plenty left to do.
52. It has been a terrific problem. Hopelessly tangled in obsolete laws, nearly landless, poverty stricken, uneducated, prey to white interests everywhere, unable to defend themselves, and finally saddled with an administrative policy which regarded them as a dying people more in need of race euthanasia than anything else, the Indians could hardly have been worse off. As far back as 1862 Abraham Lincoln said, "If we get through this war, and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed." But it is only now that this is really taking place.
53. The truth is that the New Deal Indian administration is neither as successful as its publicity says it is, nor as black and vicious a failure as the severest critics would have us believe. Many Indian problems remain unsolved, but every one has been attacked. If eddies have been stirred up, there is still a powerful current in Indian affairs, and it seems to be in a direction which gives this splendid race an opportunity to shape its own destiny.

[ Next Thread | Previous Thread | Next Message | Previous Message ]