John Collier (reformer) - Indian Advocate (1919-1933)

Indian Advocate (1919-1933)

That year Collier first encountered American Indians while visiting a friend, the artist Mabel Dodge, at the Taos Pueblo in Taos, New Mexico. For much of the next two years, he spent time at an art colony near Taos, where he studied the history and current life of American Indians. By the time Collier left Taos in 1921 for a teaching job in San Francisco, he believed that Indians and their culture were threatened by the encroachment of the dominant white culture and policies directed at their assimilation.

He rejected the contemporary policies of forced assimilation and Americanization. He began to work for the acceptance of cultural pluralism to enable Native American tribes to preserve their own cultures. Collier believed Indian survival was based on their retention of their land bases. He lobbied for repeal of what was generally known as the Dawes Act, Indian General Allotment Act of 1887. It had been directed at Indian assimilation by allotting Indian reservation land into individual household parcels of private property. Some communal lands were retained, but the US government declared other lands "surplus" to Indian needs and sold them privately, much reducing reservation holdings.

Collier believed that the general allotments of Indian reservation land was a complete failure that led to the increasing loss of Indian land. He emerged as a federal Indian policy reformer in 1922, and strongly criticized the Bureau of Indian Affairs policies and implementation of the Dawes Act. Prior to Collier, criticism of BIA had been directed at corrupt and incompetent officials rather than the policies. For the next decade, Collier fought against legislation and policies that were detrimental to the well-being of Native Americans and was associated with the American Indian Defense Association.

His work led Congress to commission a study in 1926-1927 of the overall condition of Indians in the United States. The results were called the Meriam Report. Published in 1928 as The Problem of Indian Administration, the Meriam Report revealed the failures of federal Indian policies and how they had contributed to severe problems with Indian education, health, and poverty.