Evening Star Newspaper, May 24, 1931, Page 73

Features Wide World Photes Chiefs of a tribe of famous Indians form the picturesque group overlooking a scene reminiscent of their forefathers’ fight against the advance of the white man. OT long ago a descendant of our original American population (who, incidentally, as a nationally known publicist, has a hard-earned income of several thousand dollars a week) remarked that the greatest mistake the In- dians ever mgle was in permitting the Mayflower to land! - There was painful truth in Will Rogers’ witticism, as there is truth in many others from the same source. Within the last few weeks, however, certain events have occurred which, if they had been portrayed for the motion picture screen by some of my California fellow citizens, probably would have been subtitled: “Came the Dawn, for the Indians.” Belween the dawning of a new era for nearly a third of a million people, most of whom are now wards of the Federal Government, and the day when they will be firmly established as economieally independent, free citizens, perhaps a generation will lapse. Here is one of the most interesting human problems the administration in Washington has to solve. It is a problem made up of 200 distinct tribal groups, speaking more than 50 languages or dialects and living in more than two score States. Let me put that problem in human terms, rather than statistics. Here, for instance, are 100 dark, bright- eyed Indian boys and girls,-from 5 to 14 years of age, on a Western reservation. A few of them have parents who can speak, read or write English; most of them have not. Some of them have parents who are economically independent—earning a living without drawing on tribal funds or depending on Government bounties or loans. Many have not. Some of them will have substantial in- heritances of land; many will not. All of these children are wards of the Government in faraway Washington, for the reservation was established by compact with the tribe many years ago, when ancestors then living were moved in a body from another part of the country that white men wanted to settle and put under the plow. Now the job of the Government is to educate those 100 bright-eyed children of a race that seems “alien” to the governing one—which is really alien itself. For many years past the Government has been maintaining By Ray Lyman Wilbur, United States Secreta ry of the Interior. schools and educating Indian children, and adults, too, in a fashion, but still there are scores upon scores of thousands of Indians who cannot speak, read or write English and who cannot earn their own living. Shall we send these Indian children to a Govern- ment boarding school just for their own race, as in the past? Or shall we try to secure entrance for them in the public schools of the surrounding counties, there to mingle with another race? WE know from our experlence of decades that the Indian education of the past has failed—not that the children and older Indians did not learn what was in the books, but that this kind of education did not fit them to go out into the world about the reservation and become self-supporting. Thousands and thousands of Indians have been educated—then gone back to a primi- tive, tribal existence, because they were still strangers to the white civilization that surrounded the reservation. Now multiply those 100 children by several hundred and you will still not have the full measure of our na- tional Indian problem. For, in addition, there are thou- sands of full grown adult Indians who, to a large ex- tent, are dependent upon the Government for their ex- istence. Many of them are willing to work, but do not know how or where; others feel that the Government owes them a living. What are we to do with these thousands of people and their descendants? Shall the Federal Government at Washington continue, generation after generation, to maintain a guardianship and protectorate, to spend millions from the Federal Treasury without substantially benefiting those upon whom the money is spent? These are the problems, or some of them, relating to the Indians, that we have had to face in the two years the present national administration has occupied office. Again let me reduce the problem to actual human dimensions. Here, for example, is an Indian family in Arizona, in the most dire need. They are merely exist- ing in-a wretched hut, with no windows, with a dirt floor, the father afflicted with tuberculosis, the children with trachoma that threatens the destruction of their eyesight. They have no material resources worth men- tioning. The Government provides hospital care, fur- nishes needed food, arranges for future support untit tribal conditions improve. This is the problem of the Federal Government by virtue of the fact of an old Indian treaty, making these people wards of the Government. Yet not a hundred miles away, in a populous city, is a family of white peo- ple in similar eircumstances—but for whose economic welfare the Government will not be held accountable. Certainly the plight of many Indians is nothing less than tragic; yet, just as certainly, a bad condition has been exaggerated and made to seem universal. The fact is that there are many Indians who may be said to be “suffering” from too much afluence! While the agents of the Indian Bureau are doing all that is possible to assist the unfortunate family I have men- tioned, other agents are attempting to dissuade another group of Indians—father, mother, two sons and two daughters—from buying six separate and distinct new limousines with the proceeds of an oil lease that may or may not continue to yield large returns. ,Such economic contrasts may be found in any Targe city, in almost any countryside, among people of the white race. Disease, poverty and misfortune know no barriers of race, color, nationality or creed. Yet we are charged with—and feel—a singular and compelling na- tional responsibility with respect to tHe troubles of de- scendants of the original Americans, for, whether wisely or otherwise, we have assumed to exercise a guardian- ship over the Indian people. As a physician I have been called upon, in early days of practice, to deal with troublesome dislocations of human anatomy. Now, as the head of a department of the Government, it is my duty to deal with a vast & human dislocation—the economic dislocation of a race. Such economic dislocations, unfortunately, are no# rare. I have lately seen such a dislocation in the visl§