Mr. Toastmaster, ladies and gentlemen:
It gives me great pleasure to come back to Oregon as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. This is the State where I began my professional interest in- the American Indian almost JO years ago. I was a graduate student in anthropology at that time and did my field work on the Klamath Reservation in the summer of 1934 and through the fall, winter and spring of 1935 and 19J6. The learning process is still going on--seven days a week, 365 days a year.
I am honored to be selected by the City Club of Portland as your guest speaker today. I welcome the opportunity of sharing with you some of the things I have learned about Indian affairs over the past three decades and of reporting to you, briefly, on the current status of our programs in the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Two years ago this month an important milestone was reached in the history of the Bureau. On July 10, 1961 a task force of four members, including myself, completed an intensive three-month study of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. We submitted a report of our findings and recommendations to the Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Stewart L. Udall. The report was subsequently approved, in the main, by Secretary Udall, and it became the charter of our present-day policies and programs. The keynote recommendation was a call for much greater emphasis on Indian development--both the development of Indians as people and the economic development of Indian-owned resources on the reservations.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs is one of the oldest agencies in our Federal Government. Our origins go back to the colonial period and we have been in continuous existence for 139 years. Over this period of nearly 14 decades Congress has from time to time redefined and expanded the work of the Bureau until today our organization bears little resemblance to the purely diplomatic and trade-regulating agency that was originally established in 1824.
At present about 380,000 people come within the scope of our programs. This includes not only the Indians living on reservations throughout the country (like Warm Springs and Umatilla here in Oregon) but also all the people in the native villages of Alaska--Indian, Eskimo and Aleut--and large numbers of Indians living on trust or restricted land in former reservation areas of Oklahoma.
The responsibilities that we have with respect to these people are essentially twofold. On the one hand, we provide them with a variety of services such as education, welfare aid, police protection and road construction and maintenance in locations where these services are not available from the usual State and local agencies serving non-Indian citizens. Secondly, we serve as trustees for about 50 million acres of land that belongs to the Indian people. This includes most of the land making up the reservations as well as a number of scattered tracts known as public domain allotments. Nearly four-fifths of the total acreage-- about 39 million acres altogether--consists of tribal land which is the property of a whole tribal group. The balance is made up of comparatively small tracts which were allotted by the Government many years ago to individual tribal members. Because of the processes of inheritance, the ownership of many of these allotments has become exceedingly complex and this "heirship problem", as we call it, is one of our most troublesome administrative responsibilities.
As trustees, we are responsible not only for protecting the Indian owners of this land, tribal or individual, from improvident disposition or leasing of the property. We also assist them to achieve the highest possible income from the lands and related resources that is consistent with sound conservation principles. And this gets us into a second group of programs, mainly technical in nature, in such fields as forestry, range management, irrigation, credit, and leasing for mineral development or for surface uses such as agriculture, grazing, or commercial and industrial development.
So much for the older program operations of the Bureau--those that go back 30 or 40 years or even back to our beginnings. In the last dozen years or so, the Bureau has launched a number of new programs aimed at quickening the pace of economic advancement for Indian people and helping them to higher standards of living.
One of these, for example, is a program of employment assistance. This involves vocational training and the relocation of wage-earners and their dependents to urban-industrial areas for direct employment.
Another is our industrial development operation. By this program we encourage the establishment of manufacturing plants of the light-industry type on or near the reservations so as to provide more steady jobs for Indian workers.
Still another example is our work in the field of housing development those of you who have visited Indian country know that their housing is truly shocking. Our newest program is an effort to improve the situation by adapting the established programs of the Federal housing agencies to reservation needs.
This will, I hope, give you some idea of what we are doing in the Bureau. It is, as you can see, a highly complex and multifaceted operation.
Three main goals were recommended by the Task Force. They now provide the orientation of all our program activities. They are (1) maximum Indian economic self-sufficiency, (2) full participation of Indians in American life, and (3) equal citizenship privileges and responsibilities for Indians.
These are not novel goals. They are merely a statement with respect to Indians of what the rest of us seek for ourselves, the question is not whether they are desirable goals. I have yet to hear anyone disagree with them, the question is, "What are the best means by which these ends may be reached?"
There are two philosophies. One holds that the reservation system, with attendant trusteeship and the existence of the Bureau of Indian Affairs with its programs of property management and human betterment hold back individual Indians from reaching these desirable goals.
The other philosophy holds that the protection of property and the provision of special services is all that stands between Indian individuals and ultimate poverty, destitution, and dependency.
The truth, as usual, lies between the two extremes. Our present programs are designed to take into account the realities of Indian life as it is actually lived on and near the reservations, not as the ideologists of either extreme visualize it. The facts are that Indian people themselves place a high value on the Indian trusteeship. In the main they do not wish it to home to an end but regard it as a necessary and desirable relationship which is due them in return for lands needed and promises made long ago. Individually they chafe under its restrictions; collectively they resist efforts to end it.
Alongside this is the fact that most reservations are places of little opportunity. Life on a reservation can be grim and harsh. Al though many prosperous and happy persons live on reservations and prefer it, they are the exception. Reservation life, for the bulk of Indian people, has meant an educational level half that of the national average; an income one-fourth to one-third the national average; an unemployment rate six or seven times the national average; and age at death two-thirds the national average.
It has long been the objective of various Commissioners of Indian Affairs to bring these deplorable figures of human welfare closer to the American standard. As long as reservations exist, the trusteeship continues, and people live on reservations, it is the duty of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to devise programs and operate them so that these conditions of life will improve.
It was the opinion of the Task Force that the goals we described are attainable, not a dream. Life on the reservations can be much better; while those who desire to leave the reservations and seek opportunity nearby or in metropolitan centers should be prepared and helped to succeed. The programs outlined by the Task Force now being placed in effect by the Bureau of Indian Affairs are programs of education and individual betterment both on and off the reservations; and of economic and community development on the reservations, looking toward a better life for all.
How much progress have we made in the two years since the Task Force Report was submitted? What remains to be done?
Let us look first at education, which is fundamental in any long-range program of human betterment. In the early part of 1961, even before the Task Force was appointed, President Kennedy urged the Congress to provide funds for an accelerated program of Indian school construction. The Indian school plant stretches from the Everglades of Florida to the Arctic Coast of Alaska. It includes nearly JOO separate installations, some old: some new, some large, some small. The older buildings are badly deteriorated and in urgent need of rehabilitation or replacement. Furthermore, there have never been enough classroom seats, especially on the Navajo Reservation of the Southwest, and in Alaska, to accommodate the school-age population. The goal of President Kennedy's program in early 1961 was to provide facilities for all Indian children and to relieve overcrowding and hazardous conditions in obsolete boarding and day schools without delay.
Over the past two years Congress has responded generously. Enough funds "lave been provided to rehabilitate and modernize some of our worst "problem" structures. But the main effort has been to expand the capacity of the entire system by about 7,000 classroom seats and associated dormitory beds. Some of the projects made possible by these appropriations have now been completed.
Many more are under construction. The rest are in the design stage. In the meantime, of course, our school-age Indian population has been relentlessly increasing year by year along with the school-age population all over the country.
Aside from the construction aspect, we have made many other improvements in our education program over the past 24 months. Two-thirds of the Indian children go to public schools, but one-third of them live in isolated areas and are not served by public schools. Eighty percent of these children come from homes where English is not the household language. So we are giving much more attention to improving the techniques of English language instruction which I regard as crucially important.
In our boarding schools, where the children are our responsibility 24 hours a day and seven days a week throughout the academic year, we have substantially enlarged our staff of attendants and counsellors. We have upgraded the requirements for many of these positions, and have increased their in-service training.
We have greatly expanded the scope of our summer programs which involve student employment, outdoor sports, acceleration of academic work, pre-school classes for children, and organized trips to national or regional points of interest for the older students. In the summer of 1960 about 2,000 Indian students took part in these programs; last summer the number was nearly 13,000; and this year it will go still higher.
During this period we have also established a new school, the Institute of American Indian Arts, on the grounds of our old boarding school at Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our purpose here is to provide a first class residential high school plus two years of post-high school technical training. The students selected are Indian young people with special aptitudes in painting, sculpture, design, music, creative writing, ceramics, textiles and many other fine and applied arts. The school opened last fall on a partial basis with an enrollment of about 140 students from 74 tribes. This fall we are planning for a student body of approximately 250 in the arts courses. We will eventually reach 500.
Meanwhile we have expanded our adult education program on the reservations for the benefit of those adult Indians who went through childhood without sufficient schooling. We are now conducting adult education programs at 127 locations in Alaska and on Indian reservations here below. Two years ago the number was 97. Some of these are evening or day time classes to make up for lost schooling. Others are programs of community development,
In the field of higher education advances have also been made. Last year early 2,900 Indian young men and women were attending classes in colleges and universities, 724 of them with help from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Each year since the Task Force Report we have doubled the Federal money available for higher education grants and loans.
One program of the Bureau that especially impressed us on the Task Force during the course of our study was that of adult vocational training. This activity was started in 1958; by the spring of 1961 it had shown itself to be a highly successful operation. It was equipping Indians, generally in the age bracket from 18 to 35, with marketable skills, boosting their earning power, and was providing them with greater job security than they had formerly known as unskilled workers. The rate of employment for those who finished training compared very favorably with that of the GI training program of the Veterans Administration. The Indians themselves were highly enthusiastic about these opportunities.
In the original legislation authorizing this program the amount of annual appropriation was limited to $3,500,000. In 1962 Congress more than doubled this authorization, raising it to $7,500,000. As a result of the steady increase in the money available, we now have twice as many Indians enrolled in vocational schools as we had two years ago; more than 1,300 at the end of May. Over the whole five year period since 1958 more than 8,900 Indians have received training
