The Meriam Report (1928), whose official title was The Problem of Indian Administration, was commissioned by the Institute for Government Research (IGR, better known later as the Brookings Institution) and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. The IGR appointed Lewis Meriam as the technical director of the survey team, to compile information and report of the conditions of American Indians across the country. Meriam submitted the 847-page report to the Secretary of the Interior, Hubert Work, on February 21, 1928.
The report combined narrative with statistics to criticize the Department of Interior's (DOI) implementation of the Dawes Act, and overall conditions on reservations and in Indian boarding schools. The Meriam Report was the first general study of Indian conditions since the 1850s, when the ethnologist and former US Indian Agent Henry R. Schoolcraft had completed a six-volume work for the US Congress. The Meriam Report provided much of the data used to reform American Indian policy through new legislation: the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It strongly influenced succeeding policies in land allotment, education, and health care. The report found generally that the US federal government was failing at its goals of protecting Native Americans, their land, and their resources, both personal and cultural.
Read more about Meriam Report: Lewis Meriam and The Survey Team, Results
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“There was never a man born so wise or good, but one or more companions came into the world with him, who delight in his faculty, and report it. I cannot see without awe, that no man thinks alone and no man acts alone, but the divine assessors who came up with him into life,—now under one disguise, now under another,—like a police in citizen’s clothes, walk with him, step for step, through all kingdoms of time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)