Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,221

This is the grave of John Collier.

Born in 1884 in Atlanta, Collier grew up wealthy but lost both parents by the time he was 16, his mother from pneumonia and his father probably by suicide. Still, the family money remained and Collier got out of the South, going to Columbia. He also studied at the College de France in Paris.

Now, Collier, like many American intellectuals, had a lot of concerns over how industrialization affected people. There were lots of types like this–people who started with the idea that Old Ways and especially farming was the natural state of people and so things such as factories and cities were counter to the human experience. So he became a kind of settlement house worker in the early 20th century. He was employed by the People’s Institute, a New York City organization that provided educational opportunities to immigrants and the poor. Nothing particularly wrong with this of course, but the idea of improvement comes from the place that these people are flawed and need to improve. But this is very Progressive Era and whatever one wants to say about Collier, he was a hell of a lot better than a lot of Progressives.

None of this is what we remember Collier for. See, he was also part of the New York cultural elite. He was in the orbit of Mabel Dodge, who was just starting her second life of playing Indian in New Mexico, really starting the long and august tradition of rich white women from eastern cities going to Santa Fe and Taos and wearing hoop skirts (the male version of this is bolo ties) while living in expensive homes drawn from Pueblo styles but not really trasnfering anything like power or control of New Mexico back to the tribes. Dodge had even married Tony Luhan, a Taos man; though that complex marriage was nothing like an equal partnership, it sure gave her cultural cache.

Collier was attracted to what Dodge Luhan said about Pueblo life. Here were people who were not in cities or factories. Instead, they were still trying to live traditional lives in rural landscapes. But unlike the vast majority of people who see whatever they want to in Native societies, Collier decided to do something useful not just to them, but with them. He decided to become the nation’s biggest policy expert on the issue and to return power to the tribes if he could. This started with his belief that assimilation polices threatened their cultures, which was both true and definitely came out of the Native purity world that certain whites liked to promote. But he was genuinely moved to action. The General Federation of Women’s Clubs named him as a research agent for their Indian Welfare Committee in 1922.

He spent the next decade arguing to repeal the Dawes Act, which allowed whites to buy reservation land and was the next step in the genocidal stripping of land from the tribes. He took on the Bureau of Indian Affairs for its policies banning Native religion and languages, personified in the horrifying policies of the Carlisle Indian School and other sites that sought to “kill the Indian, save the man,” as stated by its founder Richard Henry Pratt. He was effective enough that Congress launched an investigation of just was going with the BIA in 1926, which led to the Merriam Report that showed the failures of so-called Indian Policy in previous decades.

So when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the presidency in 1933 and named Harold Ickes as Secretary of the Interior, he was happy to listen to his new appointee and bring in Collier to head the BIA. Collier pushed hard, getting the Indian Reorganization Act passed in 1934. This did end the Dawes Act. It allowed for some tribal self-government. It allowed the tribes to manage the natural resources on their reservations, thus providing them with actual financial resources. Capital was furious about this–the reservations were there to be exploited for them. So this was a big, big deal. He wanted to eliminate the BIA entirely, but Congress wouldn’t go that far. Still, the IRA is a transformational law and almost all for the better for the tribes, though not all of them. This has been called the Indian New Deal and that title fits.

So Collier is one of the few whites who really did some things to overturn a legacy of racism. However…..Collier still very much saw the Indians as people for him to experiment upon. They were pure, whites were not, and their purity needed defending, sometimes from themselves. Then there was the Navajo. After the return of the Navajo from the genocidal Navajo Long March into eastern New Mexico and their internment in Fort Sumner in 1868, they were given large parts of their land back but told not to raid. So they moved their economy to sheep herding. That led to some pretty bad overgrazing by the 1930s. Collier went in and simply ordered the destruction of Navajo sheep and goat herds, very much against the will of the people. I’ve written about this in the labor history series if you want to read about it in more detail. Collier simply would not listen to the Navajo here. It was so bad that all the way to the present, many Navajo recoil when they hear the word “environmentalism” because to them it means the federal government once again running roughshod over their rights and culture. This was really, really bad on Collier’s part, even if he was factually correct about the overgrazing issue.

Still, Collier was by far the least horrible person in the BIA up to that time. But there’s something else that makes all this even weirder. See, Collier was still experimenting on Native peoples. He really did see all this as an experiment–can we keep them in their pure state if we give them self-governance? So when World War II started and the nation decided to round up all the Japanese Americans in concentration camps, Collier was glad to run two of the big ones on reservation land–Poston and Gila River. The War Relocation Authority wasn’t sure about this, so they gave him Poston and kept Gila River for themselves. Now he could experiment on Asians too. Again, this wasn’t like medical experimentation. But again, he saw non-whites as purer and hoped he could learn about Asians to make them never-changing either. So he created concentration camp rules at Poston that revolved around what he thought were core Japanese characteristics, which he thought were forms of cooperative communities that could show white America how to live. Collier was just a really weird guy, basically. The WRA finally forced Collier out in 1943. He stayed on as Commissioner of Indian Affairs until 1945.

Collier spent his remaining years living in New Mexico, except when teaching at CCNY, which he did on occasion. He wrote a lot too and was president of the National Indian Institute for awhile. He died in 1968, at the age of 84.

John Collier is buried in El Descanso Cemetery, Rancho de Taos, New Mexico.

If you would like this series to visit other BIA heads–and what a group that is–you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Now….I have to say that in month of August, LGM reader donations to keep the grave series alive amounted to…..$5. So while I appreciate the generosity of LGM readership of many issues over the years, c’mon folks. Charles Burke (a real racist piece of shit) is in Pierre, South Dakota and Cato Sells (not much better) is in Cleburne, Texas. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.