Pow-Wow

Into Rapid City, S. Dak. last week shuffled 300 Crows, Sioux, Chippewas, Shoshones, Blackfeet, Flatheads. They went into encampment, not in clay-painted buffalo hide wikiups, but in closed government school buildings. They held a four-day powwow, not crouched around council fires but seated in armchairs in an oak-paneled room of a government building. But old as U. S. history were the things they talked about--land and government.

For Indians, the Great White Father at Washington had a New Deal in mind. To explain a new and revolutionary Indian bill now before Congress, the President had sent out a little stoop-shouldered representative, not much of a man for hunting or herding, but a longtime warrior for justice to the Aborigines. In effect, Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier proposed that his Federal job be abolished. Under the Howard-Wheeler bill, the Government would: 1) develop self-government on Indian reservations; 2) set up an autonomous Indian judiciary system; 3) gradually remove control of Indian affairs from the Interior Department; 4) buy back reservation lands which had slipped from Indian control and restore them to their oldtime owners.

Three hundred years of suspicion stared from his copper-skinned listeners' eyes as Commissioner Collier asked the Indians to tell their tribesmen to support the New Deal. The plan's enemies had called it a "back-to-the-blanket" movement. Retorted Commissioner Collier: "Large cattle companies control most of the Indian-owned land. An allotment system which already has deprived the Indians of two-thirds of their lands is operating to turn over the remaining land to the whites. It is taken for granted that these leasing interests will resist the program."

To combat this sort of opposition, Commissioner Collier had five more intertribal councils scheduled throughout the West.

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