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1936 Ann. Rep. Comm'r Off. Indian Aff. Sec'y Interior 159 (1936)

handle is hein.doi/annrepcom0099 and id is 1 raw text is: OFFICE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS (JOHN CoLLm, Commissioner) FOREWORD An annual report on Indian affairs, were it adequate, would be a report on the whole life of a race. What follows describes gov- ernmental activities and only through shadowy implication reveals the forces of life working within the reviving Indian population of more than 230 tribes and bands. For many decades the Indians were thought of, and they thought of themselves, as a dying race. Numerically they were dying. As battling groups they had lost their fight. As civilizations their day was ended. Then very gradually but unmistakably the Indians' life-tide seemed to turn. The critical change goes back a decade and a half, or longer. Three years ago, the basis of Indian law was altered. Indian law had presumed the cessation of Indians. The changed law presumed their permanence and their increase. Indian Service, the Indians' mind, the general public's mind, became hopeful of the Indians' future. This future would be realized in terms of numbers increasing, not dwindling; of property-holdings increasing, not con- tinuing to melt away; of cultural values preserved, intensified, and appreciated and sought for by the white world, and no longer treated as being significant only in terms of an outlived or crushed primitive world. All of these evidences of new birth and new assurance have been forthcoming in the recent years, and never so richly as during the year just closed. The population record alone is an impressive one. Indians are increasing faster than any other group in the United States. Full-blood Indians are increasing at more than one percent a year. This, although the preventable morbidity rate is still excessive. From 1887 to 1932, the average diminishment of Indian landhold- ings was 2,000,000 acres a year. Now, an increase is recorded at the rate of hundreds of thousands of acres a year. But the land-supply of fully half the Indians is all but hopelessly insufficient. Their economic level, by and large, is still the lowest in the United States. The renascent Indian spirit has shown two great evidences. One of these is the universal, eager response of Indians to the opportunity to work, and their faithfulness and technical capacity when em- 159 98234-36-12

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