THE ADMINISTRATION
Indian Fighter In his office in the Department
of the Interior, stoop-shouldered, intense little John Collier shuffled
through a neat stack of papers, stopped occasionally to stare at a
corncob pipe in an empty water glass on his desk. In his baggy old
long-sleeved green sweater, he looked like a country storekeeper
closing out the week's accounts. Actually, he was closing out twelve
years with the Government. As U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs since 1933, John Collier has
continued to be just what he was before he became a public official:
the best friend the American Indian ever had. As social worker and
Government man, John Collier has indignantly stood out against the
prevailing U.S. opinion that the Indians are not only shiftless
ne'er-do-wells but also a decadent, dying race. A visit to the Pueblos
in New Mexico in 1920 made him decide to fight for the Indian's right to
keep his old life and culture. John Collier became executive secretary of the American Indian Defense
Association in 1923 and promptly tackled Albert B. Fall, then Secretary of the Interior, who was pushing hard
for legislation to make the Indians Christians and also to open all of
their lands to squatters. Fall's laws never passed, and Collier hoped
for better times under President Herbert Hoover. But in John Collier's
bitter summary, “Hoover didn't give a damn about the
Indians either.”
New Deal for Redskins. By the time the New Deal
had come to Washington, Collier was the No.11 U.S. spokesman for the
often exploited, inevitably neglected Indian. “Terrible
Harold” Ickes, the new Interior Secretary, gave Collier the job of
Commissioner. The crusader for Indian justice resolved to give the
Indians their own New Deal. Since 1887 the Indians had been swindled by whites out of 91 million
acres. They were largely paupers. Collier determined to make the Indians
mainly self-governing and selfsupporting, to go back a little way to
their old culture and the better features of their own kind of community life. Collier's Reorganization Act, adopted by Congress in 1934 over the
fierce opposition of lumbermen and ranchers , opened the way. Indians finally had the use
of their tribal holdings and the right to extend them. Also each
reservation could, by majority vote, incorporate its business affairs
under federal charter and secure a constitution. Now 60, John Collier, who neither hunts, fishes, nor speaks any Indian
language, is moderately pleased with what has happened since then. The
Indians' income is up 300%, their death rate down from 28 to
13.5 per thousand. Since 1900 their population has increased 53% . John Collier, who hopes to establish an organization to
help all U.S. minorities, thinks that eventually his Indian friends can
become happily integrated with the U.S.
economy. “But,” says he, “the main thing now is that at
least they have a will to live.” -Historians estimate that there were never more than about
900,000 Indians in the U.S.
