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![handle is hein.doi/annrepcom0101 and id is 1 raw text is: [Reprinted from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior, 1938]
OFFICE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS
John Collier, Commissioner
1N ALL our colorful American life there is no group around which
there so steadfastly persists an aura compounded of glamour, suspicion
and romance, as the Indian. For generations, the Indian has been,
and is today, the center of an amazing series of wonderings, fears,
legends, hopes.
Yet those who have worked with Indians know that they are neither
the cruel, warlike, irreligious savages imagined by some, nor are they
the fortunate children of nature's bounty described by tourists who
see them for an hour at some glowing ceremonial. We find the 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. Just as we yearn to live out our
own lives in our own ways, so, too, do the Indians, in their ways.
For nearly 300 years white Americans, in our zeal to carve out a
.nation made to order, have dealt with the Indians on the erroneous,
yet tragic, assumption that the Indians were a dying race-to 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.
THE INDIANS ARE NO LONGER A DYING RACE
Actually, the Indians, on the evidence of Federal census rolls of the
past 8 years, are increasing at almost twice the rate of the population
as a whole.
With this fact before us, our whole attitude toward the 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. No longer can we, with even the most generous
intentions, pour millions of dollars and vast reservoirs of energy,
sympathy, and effort into any unproductive attempts at some single,
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