Indian Fighter

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 ("The first time I ever came face to face with a Utopia") 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. ("Teapot Dome") 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 (who stood to lose valuable leaseholds by it), 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 (in 1928) to 13.5 per thousand.

Since 1900 their population has increased 53% (from 237,000 to 377,000*). 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.

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