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The rejection of the Reorganization Act on 73 reservations, most of them very small (but including the largest reservation, that of the. Navajos), was due in the main to energetic campaigns of misrepre sentation.carried on by special interests which feared that they would lose positions of advantage through the applications of the, act. Joining hands in this campaign of misrepresentation were stockmen who feared that the Indians would run their own stock on land hitherto leased to white interests; traders who were afraid of losing their business through the competition of Indian consumers' cooperatives; merchants and politicians in white communities on the edge of reservations; a few missionaries who resented the extension of the constitutional guarantee of religious liberty and freedom of conscience to Indians (not an element in the Reorganization Act, but enforced as a policy by the present administration); lumber interests which did not want to see Indian tribes exploit their own forest resources. These interests, working frequently by the historic method of defrauding Indian tribes with the connivance of certain of their own leaders, spread extreme and bizarre falsehoods concerning the effects of the act.

Among the myths spread by adverse interests on various reservations were such as these: Acceptance of the act would cause Indian owners of allotments to lose their land, which would then be distributed among those Indians who had disposed of their allotments; all farm crops would be impounded in warehouses and thereafter would be equally distributed among the population; the Indians would be segregated behind wire fences charged with electricity; all the livestock would be taken from certain tribes; unallotted reservations would be thrown open to white entry; Indian dances and other religious ceremonies would be suppressed; Indians would not be allowed to go to Christian churches; certain Southwestern reservations would be turned over to Mexico, etc.

THE NAVAJO VOTE

On the Navajo Reservation, certain interests disseminated the most fantastic fictions in their effort to induce the 43,500 Navajos to reject the help the Federal Government was offering them. With the aid of these fictions, and by falsely connecting the referendum on the Reorganization Act with the unpopular but necessary stock reduction program, the propagandists succeeded in bringing about the exclusion of the Navajo Reservation by a very narrow margin of votes: 7,608 for acceptance; 7,992 against acceptance. Immediately after the result became known, Navajo leaders started a movement to reverse it through a renewed referendum, which will be possible only through a new enabling act of Congress.

THE INDIAN RENAISSANCE

Considering the long history of broken treaties, pledges, and promises, the fact that 172 tribes with an Indian population of 132,000 accepted the word of the Government that the fundamental reorganization of their lives would not harm them is evidence of a new, more satisfactory relationship between the Indians and the Indian Service. The referendum elections served a most valuable purpose. They were palpable proof to the Indians that the Government really was ready to give them a voice in the management of their own affairs, and that the period of arbitrary autocratic rule over the tribes by the Indian Service had come to an end.

This evidence of good faith was reinforced by the request that the tribes begin immediately to formulate the constitutions and charters authorized by the act. Reservation committees and groups set to work at the unaccustomed task of drafting constitutions and of making plans and programs for the economic rehabilitation of the tribes. Charters and constitutions under the Reorganization Act, when once adopted, cannot be revoked or changed by administrative action. Personal government of the tribes by the Secretary of the Interior and the Indian Commissioner is brought to an end.

INDIAN EMERGENCY WORK

In the revivifying of the Indian spirit, the wide-opened benefits of Indian emergency conservation and of other relief work played an important part. It must be remembered that on many reservations the kind of depression which struck the Nation in 1929 had been a chronic condition for a long time, becoming acute when land sales dropped off and the revenue from farm and grazing lands leased to whites dropped almost to the vanishing point. Opportunities for wage work had been all but nonexistent on most reservations, and the psychology of the chronically unemployed had prevailed for so long that it was feared that most of the Indians had become unemployable.

This fear proved to be groundless. Indians young and old not merely accepted emergency relief work, but almost fought for the chance to labor. And they labored effectively. Through their effort the physical plant, the land, the water, the forests, have had many millions of dollars added to their use value in the last 2 years. Incalculable benefits have been derived from the improvement of 20 million acres of range, through the development of springs and wells and the construction of thousands of stock-water dams, through roads and truck trails, through the construction of thousands of miles of fences and telephone lines. There is not one reservation which, as a result of the emergency and relief work, is not a better place to live on, an easier place in which to gain a living from the soil.

A clear gain to the Indians—and to many white communities in the Indian country-accrued out of the grants from Public Works funds for new Indian community-school buildings, hospitals, and sanatoria, many of them built entirely by Indian labor. Yet the pressing need for structures of this kind has not been half filled. Nor is the Indian irrigation program, financed from emergency grants, more than onethird completed.

AFTER THE DEPRESSION-WHAT?

The benefit derived by the Indians from the emergency and relief work has many aspects. Thousands of the Indian workers have, for perhaps the first time in their lives, learned what it means to have sufficient nourishment of the right kind regularly. Other thousands have been able to acquire minimal household goods, clothing, livestock, and farm implements. Thousands of savings accounts have been started at the various agencies out of earnings of $2.10 per day for 20 days in the month during part of the year.

There have been entries on the debit side also. The number of bootleggers on the fringe of many reservations has multiplied; law enforcement has become more and more difficult. Automobile dealers with second-hand wrecks for sale have encouraged the younger Indians to obligate their potential earnings for years ahead; some traders have encouraged credit buying on far too lavish a scale.

But more important than these shortcomings due to the innate generosity of a race unfamiliar with wise consumption habits is the problem that arises from the introduction of a wage economy on reservations which will supply almost no permanent opportunity for wage work. After the depression is over and the emergency grants cease, what will happen to the now-working Indians?

REHABILITATION EMPHASIZED

To prepare for this inevitable crisis additional funds must be obtained for rehabilitation projects, such as land purchase, housing, the construction of barns and root cellars, the development of domestic water and sanitary facilities, the subjugation of land, the financing of purchases of seeds, implements, and livestock, the stimulation and development of Indian arts and crafts, and the organization and financing of sawmills, fisheries, and other industrial enterprises. This amended program would mean a playing down of the wage motive, a playing up of production for use.

If the necessary grants for this program be made, the Indians on many reservations should be able to pass gradually from relief work to subsistence farming, craft, and other supplemental industrial work of their own.

THE ISOLATION OF THE INDIAN SERVICE BROUGHT TO AN END

Through many administrations the Office of Indian Affairs monopolized the Indians. What services it could not render them were not rendered at all. The result was an insufficiency of substandard services. Since 1929 the Indian Service has worked increasingly toward the sharing of responsibility with other agencies. The JohnsonO'Malley Act, enacted at the beginning of the present administration, makes possible the varied use for Indians of the health, educational, agricultural, and welfare services of States.

Many nonofficial agencies have been brought into play in the Indian task, as mentioned in other pages of the present report.

Within the Federal system the outstanding unifications are those between the Indian Service and the C. C. C. (Indian Emergency Conservation Work, and the Indian Service and the Department of AgriAgriculture (Soil Conservation Service). Continued or extended cooperation with the United States Public Health Service and with the Bureau of Animal Industry has gone forward. An entirely new collaboration with the Bureau of American Ethnology (Smithsonian Institution) has been achieved. Important help to Indians has been given through the past 2 years by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, and the Land Program (now brought within the Resettlement Administration).

Not merely have these many cooperative and sharing arrangements increased the services given to Indians; they have, in addition, reacted in a stimulating and challenging fashion upon the Indian Office. Not a sequestration of Indians within one Federal bureau, but the largest use of all the agencies of helpfulness, is the guiding principle in present Indian affairs.

PERSONNEL ADMINISTRATION

Superintendents' authority affirmed.-On July 14, 1934, a statement of new policies by the Commissioner, approved by the Secretary of the Interior, set forth principles of local self-management for unit groups of Indian Service employees. It gave to jurisdiction superintendents and their staffs the rights and responsibilities for local program-planning and for local administration, The end result of this policy, and the Indian Reorganization Act principles, taken together, will be the transfer of initiative and of much authority from the Washington office to the reservations. These measures mark, therefore, the beginning of a change in the whole trend of Indian Service administration.

Group planning sought.-Restoration to superintendents of the administrative authority they enjoyed up to a decade ago has been in no sense a return to the one-man control operation of former days; superintendents can function effectively, under the new scheme of operation, only with the assistance of an organized staff and with the cooperation of organized Indian representation. Only through bringing about group thinking and group action can they help the Indians into an intelligible relationship with the various specialized Government services within reservation areas, and only by group action can they achieve the integration of these services into a rational and functional reservation program.

Thus partially released from administrative responsibility for jurisdiction programs and for jurisdiction employees, the technical and professional specialists of the Service, namely, the Washington office division directors and supervisors, have been freed to devote their energies to matters of policy, to consultant and supervisory services for field administrators and employees, and in the Washington office to the task of advice to the Commissioner and the Assistant Commissioner on the whole range of activities in their several fields of specialization.

By establishing, as a definite policy, visits to the Washington office by superintendents, individually and in groups, provision has been made for a continuous interchange of field and office viewpoints, and a means has been provided for the more efficient transaction of major jurisdiction business.

The year 1934-35 has seen these new policies of operation inaugurated and pursued in imperfect as yet very imperfect-but persevering practice. The process has tried to be the slow but sure one of education, rather than the quicker but the more superficial and bureaucratic one of promulgation by regulation. Fifty-one of the 87 jurisdiction superintendents have visited the Washington office during the year. In the Washington office, weekly staff meetings of division directors, with visiting superintendents taking an active part, have become an established practice. With the responsibility theirs for total jurisdiction administration, there has come about a changed attitude on the part of superintendents toward technical and professional supervision. Superintendents during this year have welcomed and have learned to seek the advice of division directors and supervisors. Altogether too much correspondence as yet continues to pass between the field and the office on matters that ought to be settled locally, but the foundation has this year been laid for a kind of field organization and field administration wherein superintendents assume their places as leaders, and whereby jurisdiction employees look to their local groups and not the Washington office for inspiration, guidance, and direction.

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