Problem Solver or "Evil Genius": Thomas Jesse Jones and The Problem of Indian Administration

when lewis meriam visited fort wingate on March 29, 1927, construction crews were busy converting the old military post into an off-reservation boarding school for Navajo youth.¹ The pupils attending the Charles H. Burke Indian School, located in a valley just east of Gallup, New Mexico, played on a field where US soldiers once paraded.² Their grandparents and great-grandparents had endured forced relocation and four years of internment on a meager scrap of eastern New Mexico desert before negotiating the Treaty of Bosque Redondo in 1868. The treaty secured their release and created the reservation. It also stipulated compulsory education for every child age six to sixteen, but the US government would take decades to fulfill that promise. Fort Wingate, once the final sojourn for Navajo exiles returning to ancestral homes on the new reservation, had now entered a new era of US rule in which education increasingly shouldered colonial policy.³ The school already housed 200 students, some clearly too young to enroll, all visibly diminished next to the imposing stone facilities.⁴ After the construction crews completed their work later that year the boarding school would become home to as many as 750 students.⁵

Meriam, a white Harvard Law graduate with a mind geared toward administrative efficiency, had been in the field for 137 days investigating reservation schools, hospitals, and Indian agencies across the United States on behalf of the nonpartisan Institute for Government Research (now the Brookings Institution). A Navajo girl had died from tuberculosis in the hospital on school grounds the morning of his visit, he learned. And upon touring Fort Wingate's dim and dismal dormitories, he confessed, "I was rather depressed at seeing the development of another large boarding school, especially by the attempt to utilize a lot of the old army post buildings which were poorly adapted for school use." On day 138 Meriam wrote that the boarding school at Fort Wingate "was as distressing as any place I have visited."⁶

Meriam submitted his findings to Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work nearly a year later, on February 21, 1928. Although the report singled out the Charles H. Burke Indian School, observing that "the army barracks and other structures there will never make satisfactory school buildings," the report avoided direct criticism of its namesake, the current commissioner of Indian affairs. Still, Meriam and the nine members of his survey team felt obliged to state "frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate." They pilloried the Office of Indian Affairs for working students to a degree that made a mockery of child labor laws, for neglectful Indian health services that threatened public welfare, and for a highly centralized administrative structure that dictated orders from afar yet staffed local offices with underpaid and often ill-qualified personnel.⁷

Published as The Problem of Indian Administration, Meriam's report proved to be a masterpiece of political publicity. Its recommendations set a new benchmark for reforms. Better yet, the thrust of its 847 pages could be distilled into a single sentence: "He who wants to remain an Indian and live according to his old culture should be aided in doing so."⁸ More than money or congressional oversight or improved facilities, what US Indian policy needed most was "a change in point of view." The report urged the United States to recognize that American Indian policy had always been "primarily educational" because the overarching objective had been to "adjust" primitive Native people to meet the economic, social, and vocational realities of the dominant society. If the old view insisted that Indian children should be detribalized in distant boarding schools and remade as individual allottees, the new vision maintained that education must be gradual, "locally relevant," and "adapted to individual abilities, interests, and needs."⁹

Historians have justifiably presented The Problem of Indian Administration, better known as the Meriam Report, as the culmination of a progressive movement in US Indian policy that catapulted radical reformist John Collier into the...