I plan to discuss the Indian New Deal in terms of four topics: origins, founding the New Deal, the Indian Reorganization Act, and the end of John Collier’s career in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Some of the things I will note will be in the form of questions rather than answers. A reason for our discussions here is to create a crucible of ideas where divergent interpretations may find a proper colloquy.

The Indian New Deal has become one of those contested areas in the interpretation of American history. The participants in our consideration of Indian self-rule will have...

I want to thank the Institute of the American West for the opportunity to join you in this most important discussion and to express my views on the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. The IRA was the last great drive to assimilate the American Indian. It was also a program to colonialize the Indian tribes. All else had failed to liberate the Indians from their land: genocide, treaty-making and treaty-breaking, substandard education, disruption of Indian religion and culture, and the last and most oppressive of such measures, the Dawes Allotment Act. Assimilation into the dominant society, if by assimilation we...

Nathan Margold, the solicitor of the Interior Department, drew my husband Felix Cohen to the Indians. Margold knew that Felix had a very good record of being a legislative draftsman at Columbia University. In 1933, shortly after the New Deal came into effect, he was asked to come down and work on legislation that became known as the Wheeler-Howard bill. His interest in Indians, like that of most people in the East, was very romantic. He was a good legislative draftsman, and he took the task that was given to him very seriously.

We had been married only about a...

Federal Indian policy prior to 1933 was very ethnocentric. It was designed to bring about individualism and rapid assimilation of the Indian into the mainstream of American life. There were some modest efforts to improve Indian education and health. After the publication of the Meriam Report, in 1928, considerable strides were made by the Hoover administration to rectify earlier neglect, especially in the areas of education, the quality of BIA personnel, and, to a lesser extent, health care. Even with these efforts, enforced acculturation still was the central theme in Indian policy.

A shift in Indian policy occurred with the...

There are many, including me, that believe the most enduring contribution that the Collier policies made to Indian life, especially after half a century, was to encourage traditional cultural expression. I would like to read a couple of sentences from an obituary essay that D’ Arcy McNickle chose to write about Collier in The Nation just after Collier’s death in 1968. He quoted Collier on his experience in 1920 after visiting Taos Pueblo. McNickle observed.

Watching the dancers, he [Collier] realized these were unsentimental men who could neither read nor write, poor men who lived by hard work, men who...

In 1934, the year of the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act, I was in a student party doing research on Klamath Indian Reservation in southern Oregon. We were told by our teacher and leader, “Do not go near the Indian agency, because, if you do, the Indian people will not talk to you.” This excited my curiosity. The following year I came back to see what the Klamath Agency was like.

During the first full year of the IRA, I was doing research around the agency and I attended tribal council sessions. The Klamath Agency at that time was...

Thirty years ago this month, on August 1, 1953, the Eighty-third Congress put its stamp of approval on House Concurrent Resolution 108.* With this action, the lawmakers declared themselves disposed, as a matter of official policy, to dissolve the special relationship that through much of the country’s history had bound the federal government to the Native American population. Nowhere in the resolution do we find any mention of the word termination that has come to carry such ominous portent in more recent times. Rather, the tone of the document is one of emancipation and equalization: “To end the wardship status...

Termination is a bad word, a bad name, and an evil thought. Nevertheless, it was with us. We all tend to think of the Congress and the Washington scene as the primary source of the termination push. We also see the Indian Bureau itself, particularly in that helpless floundering period from 1945 until 1958, as being responsible for the policy of termination. We are talking about a rather long period, in which House Resolution 108 comes up almost as a piece of froth on the surface of a very deep undertow.

What were some of the sources of that undertow?...

The Indian Reorganization Act was fully discussed on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. We had CCC camps all over the reservation. Apache elderly men went around from camp to camp with CCC officials. They explained the contents of the Indian Reorganization Act, what it meant, and how it was going to help the Indians.

After a year, a big meeting was held at the San Carlos Agency. The tribe overwhelmingly voted to adopt the IRA. At first, seven elderly men were elected to the council. Two years later, a younger man was selected to serve. While I was up on...

The field of Indian law and policy is rife with ambiguities. I do not know of a pocket of Indian policy that is more profoundly ambiguous than the Indian Claims Commission Act. I want to provide an objective statement of some of the events leading up to the act. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Indian tribes lost most of their land to western expansion. Payment was never made to the tribes for tens of millions of acres that were lost. In addition, it is clear that when treaty negotiators sat down, tribes still had their aboriginal land ownership....

The relocation program of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which later became the employment assistance program, was developed as a sort of panacea for the so-called Indian problem. I was in that program for several years from the time of its inception. It was a two phase program. First of all, it relocated people from the reservation areas where jobs were not available to areas where there were jobs. The other phase of the program was to relocate people from reservation areas to primarily urban areas, where they had the opportunity to take vocational training.

One of the difficulties with...

I think it is important that we talk about what termination was yesterday, what it is today, and what importance it has for us in the future. To me, termination has three basic aspects. Back in the 1950s, the federal government was trying to escape the responsibility that its relationship with Indian people had imposed. Over the years, it had wanted more control over the lives and resources of Indian people, but there was no justification for that control in the United States Constitution. It merely gave the federal government the power to regulate commerce with Indian tribes. It was...

Indian tribes and Indian people indisputably possessed a greater degree of self-determination in 1976 than they did in 1960. But my point here is not to celebrate the progress of the modern era. We cannot define, let alone measure, progress until we begin to understand the essential conflict within this country concerning its perception of Indians: the United States wants to preserve a romantic ideal of the Indian way of life, but at the same time numerous federal and state forces press for a wholesale assimilation of Indians.

It is said that the termination policy of the 1940s and 1950s...

In 1961, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall appointed the Kennedy Task Force on Indian Affairs. Some of the members who served on the task force were Francis McKinley, Philleo Nash, James Officer, and William Zimmerman. After a two year study, this commission recommended the separation of many federal programs from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This led to the creation of Indian “desks” throughout the federal establishment. We eventually had Indian desks in the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Department of Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Labor, and many of the other federal agencies...

Whatever positive virtues there have been in various federal programs for Indians since the Indian Reorganization Act, it is clear that they have not lasted long enough to solve problems. This also happened with the Office of Economic Opportunity. By 1976, because of benign neglect during the administration of President James E. Carter, the OEO programs had come to a grinding halt. How can the federal government and the American people expect one or two administrations to solve problems that have been building up for generations? That is why nothing permanent happened when Indian people received $122 million from the...

My father interpreted the Indian Reorganization Act to both the Bannock and the Shoshone tribal members. He explained the good things that were supposed to come out of the IRA. He was also a tribal chairman for a number of years and the Bannock and Shoshone Reservation was prospering. We had good farmers and they raised a lot of cattle. But government regulations and incompetent BIA administration pushed the Bannock and Shoshone into poverty.

I helped my father write letters to senators, congressmen, and the Bureau of Indian affairs, but we could never get any help. The federal government did...

I am not a religious or a spiritual leader. I am a runner for the Six Nations. That enables me to be a spokesman at many gatherings. I am also one of the Onondaga Council members. Our first duty is to oversee ceremonies. Then, we sit in council for the welfare of the people.

It is my perception that scholars often have problems in defining contemporary Native Americans. A leading anthropologist from New York State has attacked the Six Nations directly by saying that we do not exist, because there are no chief systems. I also have been told by...

I first became a member of the Blackfeet tribal council in 1954. I have been on the council since then, and I have watched things that have taken place. Prior to that time, I had listened to some of our elderly people. They were very cautious about new federal programs and alerted the council. They said, “You are going to be engaged in wars. But these wars will not be fought with guns, bows, and arrows. You are going to be fighting over documents.”

The Blackfeet tribe has been very careful. We have not contracted for very many federal programs....

In our time, thoughtful people cannot search for a reasonable past without wondering if there will be a future in which to make use of it. In the scary times in which we live, with, to mention only two examples, the nuclear holocaust weighing on our minds and life-threatening chemicals and industrial waste polluting the air, the water, and the land we breathe, the future does look rather bleak. To many of us and to a growing number of young people in this country, a usable past seems like a frill when what we desperately need is a usable future....

I am a member of the Cheyenne-Arapaho tribe of Oklahoma, which drafted an IRA constitution. This constitution has resulted in many drawbacks for the Cheyenne-Arapaho, but it has been most helpful in certain practical matters. When I served in the Department of the Interior during the Carter administration, I had the privilege of working with the Northern and Southern Cheyenne people in an effort to keep Bear Butte, a very important holy place, from being sold. Secretary Cecil Andrus was able to purchase this acreage for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma because they were an IRA constituted entity....

I am not as optimistic about the issue of Indian sovereignty as some people. It depends upon how you define sovereignty and what makes a people sovereign. From my understanding of the term and the way it is generally used it means the ability to completely control one’s own affairs regardless of intervention by outside powers. Given that sort of framework, I am pessimistic about restoring tribal sovereignty.

During the very earliest periods of Indian-white contact and surely before the European invasion of America, Indian people were sovereign. There is no doubt about it. They controlled all aspects of their...

I am from the Nez Perce tribe in north central Idaho. What we need most of all is respect for our tribe from the city, county, state, and federal governments. They should give us the opportunity to control our resources within the boundaries of the reservation. If that happened, all the other things such as economic development would fall into place.

The Nez Perce Reservation contains approximately 750,000 acres, but we own only 90,000 checkerboarded acres because of land allotment and some other things. Most people know that we are a minority within the reservation, and we often come out...

By any standards, the trust obligation of the federal government is a sensitive and delicate issue. It seems to me that the trust obligation is sensitive and complex because it is so multifaceted. And we all appreciate that as a concept it is poorly understood. The trust has several dimensions: it has a moral and political dimension, it has historical roots and development, and it has a legal dimension. It is very important to assess the way the trust obligation is perceived by informed non-Indians who deal in Indian affairs, and the way in which it is perceived by Indians....

A few years ago, we asked for a meeting with former President James E. Carter. Indian people, with expertise in technical matters and federal Indian policy, had developed papers that we were going to carry to the president. Unfortunately, President Carter never showed up for this meeting, and it seemed that the people he sent in to represent him did not want to listen to us.

I doubt whether any president is interested in listening to the viewpoints of Indians. But Ronald Reagan recently has made an important statement regarding Indian affairs. One of the things he promised was to...