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[First Page] [301], (1) Lines: 0 to 43 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [301], (1) Editor’s Postscript There is an overused but nonetheless appropriate axiom that says the more things change the more they remain the same. As a commentary on the history of Indian-white relations in the United States, it is apropos. As we enter this twenty-first century, the Office of Indian Affairs personnel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remain as controversial and contentious as ever. In the collective American psyche, the predominantly negative perception of federal policies and programs geared toward reforming Indian people not only persists but has intensified. The academic community has been particularly aggressive in its attack, rejecting the rationale of “good intentions–bad results”so often used to explain and justify the actions of men such as Edwin Chalcraft. Yet there is value in an objective examination of these pioneer “social workers” who devoted their lives to the physical if not the cultural preservation of American Indian people. To make an accurate assessment of the oia and its employees, we need to know more about the context of the times in which they labored and how their attitudes and behaviors reflected their age and the world they knew. We need to know the impact their decisions and actions made on Indian affairs and to understand how their own unique background and beliefs, abilities and deficiencies helped and hindered them in performing their duties and achieving their goals. We hope there are many more histories like Chalcraft’s waiting to be uncovered that will enrich our understanding of the infinitely complicated relationships 301 [Last Page [302], (2) Lines: 43 t ——— 402.459 ——— Normal Pa PgEnds: TE [302], (2) that existed, and still exist, between nations, peoples, and cultures. If Assimilation’s Agent is even a small contribution toward those goals, perhaps Chalcraft’s career did not end in 1925 when he reached the retirement age of seventy on the Siletz reservation in Oregon. His diary may have been only a beginning — of a future that he could scarcely have imagined. 302 其 Editor’s Postscript ...

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