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Chapter Ten Conclusion The background and detailed legislative history of the Indian Reorganization Act have presented a complex picture not easily reduced to a few simple conclusions . Before attempting to do just this, however, a few remarks on what has been learned about this topic in a general sense are in order. One theme running throughout this book has been that, at the national level, the making of governmental policy in this area involved primarily a small group of bureaucrats, elected officials, private persons outside the government , and Native American governments and societies. The sea change initiated by the 1932 national election made it possible to pass a major statute changing Indian policy in several fields. At the national level, however, such policy remained a minor matter to important leaders. Most legislators and leaders of the New Deal were ill-informed about it and involved only in insignificant ways. The measure cleared both houses of the Congress primarily because it was endorsed by President Roosevelt, whose own knowledge about the content of the bill was limited. In the second year of his presidency, Roosevelt had the authority to command consent from Democrats without challenge. There is no evidence that more than a handful of legislators knew or cared what the bill contained, as Collier once admitted, somewhat imprudently. Another underlying theme is that major change in overall policy took place against a background of limited and inadequate information on important questions—matters at the heart of the change that occurred—on the part of even key players. This is most apparent when one asks what the status of Native American governments was at the time of this vote. No one involved in the process knew the answer, not even Indian Commissioner John Collier, although he and others assumed they did. Collier repeatedly stated that he thought that, apart from a few Native American societies he knew about personally, most Indian governments had disappeared by the late 1920s and early 1930s. He thought a vacuum in governance existed on most reservations. There is no convincing evidence to support this conclusion, but even today a comprehensive picture of the actual status of Indian governments around the country at that time cannot be drawn with precision. 282 10-N1289 6/21/2000 5:16 PM Page 282 No doubt the same condition prevailed in other areas of Native American life, but the misconceptions about Indian governance were central to the reform effort that became successful in 1934. The uncertainty at the time on this question is mirrored today by the uncertainty about the impact of the Indian Reorganization Act on Native American governance, although this topic is not dealt with here. In both of these respects, Native American policy was not unique. Another problem in interpreting the events chronicled here, which is also very important but not unique to Indian policy, is the difficulty of knowing precisely and fully what was in the heads of major participants while they were engaged in enacting this law. Even after having gone through several feet of documents giving details on the drafting, early reception, and passage of the measure that became the Indian Reorganization Act, it is impossible to be completely certain what even the major players thought they were doing in the wider terms in which Native American governance has been discussed here, let alone in terms of how their actions affected the regimes and practices of hundreds of Native American societies.1 The problem stems partly from the possibility that key players may have been in some sense not completely honest in what they said about their actions . This is an inherent problem of democratic government, because voters typically expect their representatives to be men or women of principle who at the same time do what the voters want them to. It is my opinion that John Collier did not lie, but neither did he present his total view of Native Americans prior to his retirement as Indian commissioner , years after the events chronicled here. Even then, he gave versions of several important events that do not stand up well when looked at more comprehensively. Nevertheless, I have concluded he was correct when he said that he did have a “complex of central purposes,” which remained basically stable over his lifetime and out of which his work on behalf of Indians evolved. These derived in part from religious experiences, which he had expressed publicly only in partial terms before he became...

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