John Collier (May 4, 1884 – May 8, 1968), a sociologist and writer, was an American social reformer and Native American advocate. He served as Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, from 1933 to 1945. He was chiefly responsible for the "Indian New Deal", especially the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, through which he intended to reverse a long-standing policy of cultural assimilation of Native Americans.
During the second World War, in part due to his position in the BIA, Collier also became involved with the incarceration of Japanese Americans at the Poston War Relocation Center and desired greater involvement at the Gila River War Relocation Center.
Collier was instrumental in ending the loss of reservations lands held by Indians, and in enabling many tribal nations to re-institute self-government and preserve their traditional culture. Some Indian tribes rejected what they thought was unwarranted outside interference with their own political systems that the new approach had brought them, and Collier's policies led to a wide range of outcomes and reactions.
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Early life and education
John Collier was born in 1884 and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father Charles A. Collier was a prominent banker, businessman, civic leader, and mayor of Atlanta (1897–1899). He had a tragic family life: his mother died of pneumonia and his father died, possibly a suicide, before Collier was sixteen.
He was educated at Columbia University and at the Collège de France in Paris. At Columbia, Collier began to develop a social philosophy that would shape his later work on behalf of American Indians. He was concerned with the adverse effects of the industrial age on mankind. He thought society was becoming too individualistic and argued that American culture needed to reestablish a sense of community and responsibility. He graduated from Columbia in 1906. From 1907 to 1919, he worked as secretary of the People's Institute, where he developed programs for immigrant neighborhoods, emphasizing pride in their traditions, sponsoring lectures and pageants, and political awareness.
Collier centered his career on trying to realize the power of social institutions to make and modify personalities. In 1908, Collier made his first significant contribution to a national magazine; his article describing the socialist municipal government in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was published in Harper's Weekly. Collier moved to California in October 1919.
Indian advocate (1920–1933)
In 1920, Collier was introduced to the Pueblo tribes by the artist Mabel Dodge, at the Taos Pueblo in Taos, New Mexico; for much of that year he studied their history and current life. By the time Collier left Taos in 1921 he believed that Native Americans and their culture were threatened by the encroachment of the dominant white culture and policies directed at their assimilation. Collier's encounter with the Taos Pueblo made a lasting impression on him.
Collier was brought into the forefront of the debate by the General Federation of Women's Clubs (GFWC), when it appointed him the research agent for its Indian Welfare Committee in 1922. The GFWC took a leadership role in opposing assimilation policies, supporting the return of Indian lands, and promoting more religious and economic independence.
Collier rejected the contemporary policies of forced assimilation and Americanization. He worked for the acceptance of cultural pluralism to enable Native American tribes to preserve their own cultures. Collier believed Indigenous survival was based on their retention of their land bases. He lobbied for repeal of the Dawes Act, also known as the Indian General Allotment Act of 1887. It had been directed at Indigenous assimilation by subdividing Indian reservation land into individual household parcels of private property. Some communal lands were retained, but the U.S. government declared other lands "surplus" to Indian needs and sold them privately, much reducing reservation holdings.
Collier was outraged at the Americanization programs imposed by the federal Office of Indian Affairs because they suppressed key elements in Indian culture, many of which had deep religious roots. The BIA was supported by numerous Protestant organizations, such as the YWCA Indian Department, as well as the Indian Rights Association. Descended from the pioneers who had suffered from Indian raids, they denounced the dances as immoral and pagan. He formed the American Indian Defense Association in 1923 to fight back through legal aid and to lobby for Indian rights. He failed to secure positive legislation to guarantee Indian religious freedom, but his efforts did force the Bureau to curb its program of cultural assimilation and to end its religious persecutions.
Collier believed that the general allotments of Indian reservation land was a complete failure that led to the increasing loss of Native American land. He emerged as a federal Indian policy reformer in 1922, and strongly criticized the BIA policies and implementation of the Dawes Act. Prior to Collier, criticism of the BIA had been directed at corrupt and incompetent officials rather than the policies. For the next decade, Collier fought against legislation and policies that he thought were detrimental to the well-being of Native Americans and was associated with the American Indian Defense Association, serving as executive secretary until 1933.
Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1933–1945)
President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the advice of his new Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes to appoint Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. Ickes and Collier had previously been quite hostile to each other, but now came to terms and Ickes supported Collier's policies. Collier ran the agency until 1945.
Collier also set up the Indian Division of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). The CCC provided jobs to Native American men of all ages in soil erosion control, reforestation, range development, and other public works projects, and built infrastructure such as roads and schools on reservations.
Education was a high priority for Collier, who focused on ending boarding schools and transitioning to community day schools and public schools. He wanted BIA schools to stress the importance of preserving Indian culture. He emphasized the need to develop vocational training that would lead to good jobs.
Collier thought he could not only preserve Indian culture but hold it up as a model for the larger society. Historian T. H. Watkins observed that this was "rather a lot to ask of a people struggling merely to live on the fringe of civilization that had overwhelmed them; it was even more to ask acceptance of such notions from a Congress that had demonstrated little faith in the belief that white civilization had anything much to learn from the Indians."
Collier introduced what became known as the Indian New Deal with Congress's passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It was one of the most influential and lasting pieces of legislation relating to federal Indian policy. Also known as the Wheeler–Howard Act, this legislation reversed fifty years of assimilation policies by emphasizing Indian self-determination and a return of communal Indian land, which was in direct contrast with the objectives of the Indian General Allotment Act of 1887.
Collier was also responsible for getting the Johnson–O'Malley Act passed in 1934, which allowed the Secretary of the Interior to sign contracts with state governments to subsidize public schooling, medical care, and other services for Indians who did not live on reservations. The act was effective only in Minnesota.
War Relocation Centers
Serving as Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Collier had experience in overseeing a minority population segregated by the federal government. Using this experience, he petitioned the Roosevelt administration to establish the Poston War Relocation Center on the Colorado River Reservation and Gila River War Relocation Center on the Gila River Reservation, where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during WWII.
He saw this as an opportunity to extend his sociological research of the Native American population onto another minority group, justifying that he could help maintain the social structures present within the Japanese American community. His oversight of the Poston camp was carried out alongside the War Relocation Authority under director Milton S. Eisenhower, although he enjoyed seemingly unimpeded jurisdiction for much of the incarceration period. At Gila River, however, the War Department denied him jurisdiction. They did this citing that the camp would be built at the department's expense, not the BIA's, even in the face of his repeated petitioning for administration rights.
Envisioning Poston as a place where the internees could "utterly give themselves to the community", Collier wanted to demonstrate the efficiency and the grandeur of cooperative living to the American public. He did this by facilitating communities that modeled alternative forms of social organization with the intention of offering a substantive critique of American society, with which he had grown disillusioned.
A second intention of his work was to provide the U.S. government with information about people of Japanese descent that could be implemented in their assumed occupation of East Asian "dependencies it might control at the end of the war."
An additional justification that he used contended that with his leadership, the Poston camp could help protect the Japanese-American community. Harking back to his broader position as the director of the BIA, Collier wanted to uphold Japanese culture as well as "[protect] them from civilian racism, and prepare [them] to reintegrate into U.S. society after the war."
Collier's independence was short lived, however, as Eisenhower, who had tolerated Collier's practices at the Poston camp, announced his departure from the WRA in June 1942. Seeing this as an opportunity to expand his influence over incarceration, Collier began a campaign to take over the vacant position, citing his prior experience with Native Americans and his oversight of Poston as qualifying factors. Ultimately, he was unsuccessful in this endeavor, losing out to the candidate Eisenhower had recommended.
Post-government career
Collier remained active as the director of the National Indian Institute and as a sociology professor at the College of the City of New York. He wrote several books, including a memoir published in 1963. After his retirement Collier lived in Taos, New Mexico, with his second wife Grace, until his death in 1968 at age 84.
Legacy
Having described the American society as "physically, religiously, socially, and aesthetically shattered, dismembered, directionless", Collier was later criticized for his romantic views about the moral superiority of traditional society as opposed to modernity. Philp says that after his experience at the Taos Pueblo, Collier "made a lifelong commitment to preserve tribal community life because it offered a cultural alternative to modernity . . . . His romantic stereotyping of Indians often did not fit the reality of contemporary tribal life."
The Indian New Deal, Collier's chief realization, was landmark legislation authorizing tribal self-rule under federal supervision, putting an end to land allotment and generally promoting measures to enhance tribes and encouraging education. Collier was highly regarded by most Indian tribes, although he was vilified by others. He antagonized the Navajo people, and some Iroquois, including the Seneca people. For the Oklahoma Indian population, largely exempted from the Indian New Deal, the influence of Collier's efforts was felt in their process of acquiring autonomy in the last decades of the 20th century.
Although it remained relatively obscure, his administration of a Japanese-American incarceration center is representative of Collier's affinity for marginalized populations. That is not to say that he was an inherent good for those incarcerated at Poston, nor Native Americans, but that he exhibited a level of attention to ostracized populations which was not all that common in American society up to that point. It is also important to recognize that the verdict amongst historians pertaining to Collier and Japanese-Americans is undecided and requires further academic scholarship.
Anthropologists criticized Collier for not recognizing the diversity of Native American lifestyles. Hauptman argues that his emphasis on Northern Pueblo arts and crafts and the uniformity of his approach to all tribes are partly explained by his belief that his tenure as Commissioner would be short, meaning that packaging large, lengthy legislative reforms seemed politically necessary.
Historians have mixed reactions to Collier's achievements. Many praise his energy and his initiative. Kenneth R. Philp, although favorable on some points, concludes that the Indian New Deal was unable to stimulate economic progress nor did it provide a usable structure for Indian politics. Philp argues these failures gave momentum to the return to the previous policy of termination that took place after Collier resigned in 1945. In surveying the scholarly literature, Schwartz concludes that there is:
Writings
"The Board of Censorship," The Moving Picture World, vol. 4, no. 10 (March 6, 1909), pp. 265–266.
"The Indian in a wartime nation". The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (1942): 29–35. JSTOR 1023781.
"United States Indian Administration as a laboratory of ethnic relations". Social Research (1945): 265–303. JSTOR 40982119.
The Indians of the Americas (New York: W. W. Norton, 1947) OCLC 875609410
On the Gleaming Way: Navajos, Eastern Pueblos, Zunis, Hopis, Apaches, and Their Land; and Their Meanings to the World (Sage Books, 1949)
From Every Zenith: a memoir; and some essays on life and thought (Sage Books, 1963)