John lived in Atlanta for much of his early life where his father was an important banker, businessman, and civic leader. He went to college at Columbia University and studied at the College de France in Paris. He didn’t like the adverse effects of the industrial revolution and thought people were too materialistic and needed to remember the sense of community and responsibility.Collier first made contact with the Native Americans when he went to visit his friend Mabel Dodge in Taos, New Mexico in 1919. He spent most of the next two years at an art colony in the area studying the history and life of the Native Americans. In 1921 when he moved to San Francisco for a teaching job he realized that their culture shouldn’t be destroyed due to the whites taking over.He started to work against the assimilation of the Native Americans to white culture. He lobbied for the reversal of the Dawes Act which divided Indian Territory into individual land plots owned by one person, just like whites. He directly attacked the Bureau of Indian Affairs and for the next decade fought against policies that were harming the well being of the Indians.His efforts against the Bureau led to the Meriam Report. This report went out and studied the overall conditions of the Indians in the US. It was published in 1928 as “The Problem of Indian Administration”. It also revealed all the failures of the Indian policies and how they helped create problems with Indian education, health, and poverty.Once the Stock Market crashed and the Great Depression set in conditioned worsened for the Native Americans as well as the whites. Hoover responded by reorganizing the Bureau of Indian Affairs and gave it a huge funding increase. However no lasting policies were created during his presidency.Once Franklin D. Roosevelt stepped in with his New Deal policies he nominated John Collier to be Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. John immediately set up the Indian Civilian Conservation Corps which provided jobs to Native Americans in public works projects. He also set up the Indian Reorganization Act which reversed assimilation of the last 50 years and returned communal Indian land. He set up the Johnson-O’Malley Act which allowed the Secretary of the Interior to sign contracts with the states to help the social and economic well being of the Native Americans.He resigned in 1945 and became the director of the National Indian Institute and a sociology professor at the College of the City of New York. He died in 1968 back in Taos at age 84.In my opinion he worked for a noble cause as the Indians had been treated poorly ever since the Whites showed up in the Americas. He had done everything he could even though the Indians still thought he was trying to force them to accept yet another policy.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Collier_(reformer)http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3577.htmlJohn Collier with Native Americans (he's in the middle)
Native Americans being assimilated by wearing White clothing
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