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- "We Took Away Their Best Lands, Broke Treaties": John Collier Promises to Reform Indian Policy :: john collier
Apercu : Atlantisa model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. Collier proposed a sweeping set of reforms to reverse the previous half century of federal policy. Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. Service, since 1933, had made a concerted effort to rectify those past mistakes. Indian has been, and is today, the center of an amazing series of wonderings, fears, legends, hopes. Indians know that they are neither the cruel, warlike, irreligious savages imagined by some, nor are they the fortunate children of natures bounty described by tourists who see them for an hour at some glowing ceremonial. Indians, in all the basic forces and forms of life, human beings like ourselves. The majority of them are very poor people living under severely simple conditions. We know them to be deeply religious. We know them to be possessed of all the powers, intelligence, and genius within the range of human endowment. Indians were a dying raceto be liquidated. We took away their best lands; broke treaties, promises; tossed them the most nearly worthless scraps of a continent that had once been wholly theirs. But we did not liquidate their spirit. The vital spark which kept them alive was hardy. So hardy, indeed, that we now face an astounding, heartening fact. Indians, on the evidence of federal census rolls of the past eight years, are increasing at almost twice the rate of the population as a whole. Indians has necessarily undergone a profound change. Dead is the centuries-old notion that the sooner we eliminated this doomed race, preferably humanely, the better. Indians meet the myriad of complex, interrelated, mutually dependent situations which develop among them according to the very best light we can get on those happeningsmuch as we deal with our own perplexities and opportunities. Under such a policy, the ideal end result will be the ultimate disappearance of any need for government aid or supervision. Indian hope due to the actions and attitudes of this government during the last few years, that aim is a probability, and a real one. Indians is to think of land. Indian feels toward his land, not a mere ownership sense but a devotion and veneration befitting what is not only a home but a refuge. Indians remain on or near the land. When times are good, a certain number drift away to town or city to work for wages. Indian comes, and to the comparative security which he knows is waiting for him. Indian still has much to learn in adjusting himself to the strains of competition amid an acquisitive society; but he long ago learned how to contend with the stresses of nature. Indians major source of livelihood derive from the land but his social and political organizations are rooted in the soil. Indians to keep and consolidate what lands they now have and to provide more and better lands upon which they may effectively carry on their lives. Indian by tradition was not concerned with possession, did not worry about titles or recordings, but regarded the land as a fisherman might regard the sea, as a gift of nature, to be loved and feared, to be fought and revered, and to be drawn on by all as an inexhaustible source of life and strength. Indian let the ownership of his allotted lands slip from him. Indian had remaining 130 million acres. Indian had left only 49 million acres, much of it waste and desert. Indian to build back his landholdings to a point where they will provide an adequate basis for a self-sustaining economy, a self-satisfying social organization.
Voir "We Took Away Their Best Lands, Broke Treaties": John Collier Promises to Reform Indian Policy
