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sity, in the present situation of the United States in world affairs, and recognize that it applies at home as well as abroad. We should examine the assumptions Indians have concerning American Indian affairs. Such an inquiry will help us do our part to improve relations with the Indians by establishing them on a basis of consent and mutuality. It will also help us understand something of the assumptions which dominate the thinking of people in India, Indonesia, Latin America, and many other places whose destiny is linked with our own. It may even help us understand ourselves better.

In February 1954, the editions of the American Anthropologist worked up a list of the basic assumptions underlying our national approach to what is sometimes inaccurately referred to as the "Indian Problem." (The problem is at least two-sided, but we will not discuss that now.) These assumptions were circulated among more than a score of scholars and administrators, who made their comments and corrections. The corrected version was then discussed in a conference held at the University of Chicago on February 24, 1054, and the results appeared in the June issue of the American Anthropologist. Part of the record is a tentative list of Indian assumptions concerning American-Indian affairs. Ruth Hill Useem, who presented these to the conference, did not venture to assert that these assumptions were held by all Indians, but based on her statement on what she knows the Sioux. However, I found them echoed many times among the dozen tribes I visited in a swing from Santa Fe to Tacoma to Bismarck.

Why Do They Fear?

Mrs. Useem started by observing that "most Indian assumptions are negative, unenthusiastic and fearful--the outlook of a beaten people." Nevertheless the first Indian assumption reveals a certain toughness. It is that "the Indian in the foreseeable future will remain a series of separate and identifiable groups, despite the fact that some individuals are absorbed into the dominant population." This contrasts sharply with the assumption which the conference found to underlie white American Indian into the normal stream of American life is inevitable," that "Indian tribes and communities will disappear." This fundamental contradiction helps to explain centuries of failure and frustration in Indian-non-Indian relations.

Here the anthropologists side with the Indians. They point out that while there is continuing adaptation of Indian groups to the non-Indian society around them, "forced or coercive assimilation is self-defeating in practice, tending to antagonize and drive underground in the Indian groups those leaders who might develop constructive and cooperative attitudes toward . . . non-Indian society." They believe Indian communities will continue to maintain themselves as cultural islands, of which many already exist in the stream of American society. And plain Americans who are not anthropologists may well ask themselves: Why not? What is so wrong with self-determination that we cannot tolerate the thought that anybody would be different from ourselves, who differ so much from each other?

The second Indian assumption is that "over the years, the Indian can expect no consistency in policies concerning him. No matter what the policy is today, tomorrow will be different, even opposite." History sustains this dour opinion. Following the American Revolution, Indians were driven over the Alleghenies and told they might live and hunt there freely. Then President Andrew Jackson headed the movement which pursued them across the Mississippi, where they were told they might roam undisturbed. Then gold was discovered in the far west, and the reservation system was started so that Indians would not endanger the wagon trains bound for California or Oregon. next the government, without consulting its wards, decided to make farmers and stockmen out of them. Beginning in the eighties, it allotted reservation land for individual holdings. The result was that land in Indian hands shrank from 130 million to 52 million acres in less than 50 years, and Indian population reached the lowest point since long before Columbus. In 1934 the government reversed itself again and passed the Indian Reorganization act, which stopped sales of Indian land to non-Indians. Conditions improved for the Indians, although they were still the most disadvantaged group in American life. Then last year came another turn. Congress announced that the policy of the United States was to terminate the responsibilities the federal government had assumed in a long series of treaties and agreements written to endure "so long as the grass shall grow and the waters run."

A third Indian assumption is that "the interests of the dominant society will take precedence over the interests of the Indians in any policy decision; Indian interests will be considered only when they coincide [with] or do not contradict white interests." The assumptions of white people are that the government coddles the Indians, that they receive more consideration than they deserve. But what can we reply to the Three Affiliated Tribes of North Dakota when they ask us to witness what happened to their reservation lands when the white people of that state and of the Missouri valley decided to build Garrison dam? As usual, the Indians were not consulted by the Congress which in 1944 authorized construction of the dam. Today their reservation is cut into five segments, with all the best land gone and their former homes, schools and churches inundated. Or what shall we say to the Pimas and Papagos of Arizona, whose irrigation water--assured by solemn agreement supported by acts of Congress, which built dams and impounded water on which Indians held prior claim--is being taken by white farmers? Or to the Klamaths of Oregon or the Menominees of Wisconsin, whose valuable timber resources are in jeopardy?

Not So Helpless

The fourth Indian assumption is that "the Indian can do little to affect decisions concerning" his own rights, and that "non-Indians who are most sympathetic to Indian interests are individuals who have little power either to make or influence decisions." These sympathetic but ineffective people conspicuously include churchmen and university people. But two factors contradict this gloomy prognosis. All over the country there is a wholesome beginning of organization by Indians to do just what most Indians assume cannot be done--to affect decisions concerning Indian rights. And today the organizations of people friendly to the Indians have come closer to agreeing on what to do in his defense than ever in the past. These friendly forces include the leadership of Protestant and Roman Catholic churches, which do have considerable power to influence decisions if they choose to exert it.

There can be no doubt that the fifth Indian assumption is correct: "That whatever the policy enacted, the Indians will be told that such policy is 'in his best interests,' or is 'for his own good.'" The sixth is much more important: "That the turning over of Indian affairs to the states is inevitable." There are many signs that this is coming. In the beautiful council house at Window Rock, Arizona, I heard an agricultural extension agent tell the 73 men and one woman on the Navaho tribal council what he thought this was going to mean to the 75,000 people in this largest of the Indian tribes in the United States. Faces were tense as he spoke, and prolonged discussion ensued when he had finished. Some spoke in Navaho and others in English, but each language was translated into the other. There was general agreement that there was no way to stop the development and that certain things, which were also laid down by Mrs. Useem, would follow:

(a) That a state administration is more likely to be hostile to Indians than is the federal administration. There is more patterned hostility toward Indians locally. (b) That state administrations will be less able to render health and welfare services (e.g., hospital care, relief, rehabilitation). Local state government have fewer resources to run these programs than have the federal agencies. (c) The state administrations will be run by persons with whom the Indians are in direct competition for land, tax dollars, services, etc., and therefore, even though they may understand the Indian more, they will be less likely to take Indian interests into account.

A Sacred Trust

Two other Indian assumptions remain. One is that the stated goals of a policy may be and usually are quite different from the consequences of a policy, and that the goals are usually more favorable to Indians than the consequences. It is possible that this assumption applies to all human purposes, but the Indian finds difficulty in detecting the principle of universality in his particular situation, which makes him especially sensitive to hypocrisy. Finally, he assumes that some type of governmental agency should and will be responsible for Indian affairs, no matter what is aid. He knows that Senator Malone of Nevada will continue every year to introduce his perennial bill to abolish the Indian Bureau, but he expects the bureau to survive in some form. He will continue to berate the Indian Bureau for its failures to come up to his hopes. But in spite of innumerable betrayals, he cannot believe that people of the United States will finally and irrevocably violate what he regards as a sacred and perpetual trust.

These assumptions help explain the "negative, unenthusiastic, fearful" mood of our Indian fellow citizens today. It remains to ask to what extent they are justified. Some interesting light was cast on this question by a farmer from Washington state--a fellow passenger on a bus northward bound in California. At a luncheon stop I learned that he had been basking in the sun at Phoenix, but had not seen a large cotton farm run by Indians in that vicinity. He was skeptical about my report concerning the success of the farm, which is managed and operated entirely by Indians. "I haven't heard of an Indian working since I was a boy," he said. "They're no good. When I was young two Indians came and helped us shear sheep and butcher, but they weren't spoiled as they all are today. Now the more you do for the less they for themselves. I hear the government has given the Yakimas $15 million because the Dalles dam will spoil their fishing rights on the Columbia river. It doesn't make sense. They have the best land in Washington and don't have to pay taxes on it. They just lease it to white farmers and live in idleness. Imagine grown men dressing up in feathers and dancing! Now I'm told they are trying to claim the fishing rights on the whole Yakima river just because the lower river flows through their reservation. What brass! some congressman has put in a bill that would make them all leave their reservations and go out and work like other people. It would be a good thing if it passed. We are certainly not getting anywhere the way we are going."

It is not difficult to see the relation between this farmer's mood and the apprehensions of Indians in the United States today. For it happens that the views held by this farmer, with their explosive mixture of truth and error, are politically powerful in Washington and Olympia and other capitals. If they prevail and become the basis of public policy, they will only compound centuries of tragedy and frustration. To keep that from happening and to open the way for a new and mutually rewarding day in the relations between Indians and non-Indians, we must seek a deeper insight. The next article will look into Indian experience with Anglo-Saxon law and customs.

II. The Klamath Crisis

IF MOST of the Indians in the United States are not yet ready for the termination of their status as wards of the federal government, it is not because Congress has neglected to legislate on Indian affairs. In 1940 when Felix S. Cohen prepared a handbook on federal Indian law, he discovered that approximately four thousand statues had been enacted on Indian matters. By the end of the forties, a thousand more had been inscribed in the statute books. Thus the original American is buried to his neck in legal paper. As D'Arcy McNickle says in They Came Here First: "The amount of control which can be vested in five thousand statues and the regulations adopted to carry out the statues can come rather close to the absolute." This could be true, yet the reality of control eludes that lawmakers. In matters affecting the Indian, laws generally fall short of attaining the ends for which they are written, and often leave the situation they intend to redress somewhat more complicated than it was before they were written.

A law that is likely to become a classic example of legislative frustration is Public Law 587, passed by the second session of the 83rd Congress and signed by President Eisenhower on August 13, 1954. It is one of six laws providing for termination of federal supervision over as many tribes or groups of Indians in various parts of the country. P.L. 587 applies to the Klamath Indians of southern Oregon. On August 13, 1958, unless the law is changed, the gov-

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