Collier's appointment on the grounds that he was unnecessarily opinionated and emotional about Indian reform.23 In his comments on Collier's questionnaire, Boas echoed Linton's point that among Indians who were settled on allotments there was great reluctance "to merge it into the larger community," and that the allotment system had contributed largely to the breakdown of cultural ties among tribes of the northwestern coast and Plains regions with whom he was most familiar.24 This response was carefully phrased to avoid making a direct judgment on the goals of Indian reorganization.

In summary, the initial responses of anthropologists to the proposals of the reformers revealed a variety of attitudes ranging from enthusiastic support to open skepticism; none were hostile but there was an undercurrent of doubt in many comments. Boas's opinion of Collier was not necessarily shared by his colleagues: Robert Zingg of the University of Chicago spoke of the high esteem that anthropologists held for both Ickes and Collier, particularly in comparison with their predecessors.25 An appreciation of the good intentions of the reformers, however, did not imply uncritical acceptance of the reform proposals for all Indians.

Divisions of opinion also extended to the more practical question of the usefulness of anthropologists in implementing the reorganization program. Some of the younger anthropologists like Mekeel and Oliver LaFarge, who was then head of the National Association on Indian Affairs, believed that they could play a direct role in guiding the tribal organization process and helping it to conform to traditional Indian institutions. Boas, on the other hand, asserted "it is very difficult at the present time to find anyone who is well prepared for dealing with the practical problems of Indian life for the reason that no position of this kind was ever open to anyone who had studied anthropology." He recommended the use of anthro

23 Franz Boas to Harold Ickes, secretary of the interior, Dec., 1932. Boas Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pa. Marden, "Anthropologists and Federal Indian Policy," pp. 25-26, suggests that Boas's attitude toward Collier reflected his determination to remain aloof from contemporary issues and that this tendency was reinforced by his interest in primitive aspects of Indian life rather than in the problems of acculturation.

24 Boas to Collier, May 9, 1934, Wheeler-Howard files, RG 75, NA.

25 Robert Zingg to Collier, Apr. 16, 1934, Wheeler-Howard files, RG 75, NA.

pologists in training schools for incoming bureau employees, a suggestion developed by Willard Beatty in the bureau's education division. More ambitiously, he urged the incorporation of anthropology into educational programs for Indian leaders and teachers that would focus on developing an understanding of Collier's social and economic programs.26

Other anthropologists favorable to Collier's proposals, like Kroeber and Lowie, submitted informative statements on tribal political situations in the obvious expectation that they would be useful in the reorganization program, but they had no suggestions for the systematic use of anthropologists in administration. Presumably there were many anthropologists who shared the view of Melville Herskovits, later vice-president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that social scientists involved in administrative tasks on behalf of the government ran the risk of becoming proponents of policies designed to serve political rather than genuinely scientific goals.27

The Indian Reorganization Act that emerged from Congress in June 1934 had been altered in significant ways from the bill originally drawn up by Collier and his fellow reformers in the bureau. A provision authorizing the new tribal organizations to consolidate individual allotments into tribal properties had been modified. Also, each tribe or reservation could decide by referendum whether or not it chose to come under the Act and undertake the creation of tribal governments and corporations. Those groups that rejected the Act would remain under the direct supervision of the bureau. Nevertheless, much of the basic structure of the Collier proposals remained. After deciding to come under the Act the Indian tribe or group could then draw up a constitution, which was subject to a referendum. Under a constitution, a tribal council or similar form of government could be established, and the tribe could incorporate itself for the purpose of setting up enterprises such as lumber mills, livestock associations, or farm cooperatives. 28

26 Boas to Collier, Dec. 7, 1933, Wheeler-Howard files, RG 75, NA.

27 Melville Herskovits, "Applied Anthropology and the American Anthropologists," Science 83 (Mar. 6, 1936):215222. The address on which this article is based was delivered a year earlier, before the Indian reorganization program was fully in operation.

28 The final bill is printed in C. J. Kappler, ed., Indian

The most critical phase in the process involved preparing tribal constitutions, inasmuch as questions relating to representation of different groups and factions were raised. In a number of cases, Indian groups who had voted to come under the Act never got beyond this point because of irreconcilable differences among those who spoke different languages or between traditional religious and political factions and between older fullblood Indians and younger mixed-blood Indians. On these matters the assistance of anthropologists with specialized knowledge on tribal divisions was valuable.

Where possible, anthropologists were included on teams of lawyers sent to the reservations to advise and assist Indians in preparing constitutions and charters. Anthropologists were generally assigned to travel with a team covering an entire region rather than working intensively with a single tribe. This method was partly dictated by the scarcity of trained anthropologists willing and able to work fulltime for the bureau. Collier arranged for the use of part-time consultants, where possible, drawing on graduate students who were doing field work and who were readily available. This rather unstructured organization was designated the Applied Anthropology Staff and was initially under the direction of W. Duncan Strong, himself a consultant anthropologist.29

As might be expected, most of the full-time anthropologists on the staff were young. Some presumably took positions with the government because of the Depression and the lack of jobs but others left academic positions to perform tasks to which they felt strongly committed. Among the best, and best-known of the anthropologists were Oliver LaFarge, the Indian reform lobbyist who worked primarily with the Hopi in the Southwest; Morris E. Opler who worked with the Apache, Kiowa, and Comanche; H.S. Mekeel who worked with the Dakota Sioux; Gordon MacGregor who worked among other Plains tribes; Oscar Lewis, John Harrington, and Ruth Underhill

Affairs: Laws and Treaties (Washington, D. C., 1941)5:380-387. On the congressional contest over the Wheeler-Howard bill, see Michael T. Smith, "The Wheeler-Howard Act of 1934: The Indian New Deal," Journal of the West 10 (1971):521-534; and John L. Freeman, Jr., "The New Deal for the Indians: A Study of Bureau-Committee Relations in American Government' (unpublished Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1952). 29 Collier to Ickes, June 1, 1934. Collier Papers, Yale Univ., New Haven.

who worked with the Navaho, Papago, and Pima in New Mexico and Arizona.

In 1936 when Mekeel succeeded Strong as chief, the work of the applied anthropology staff became more varied. Organizational work on tribal constitutions continued for several more years. New issues and problems arose among tribes already under constitutions when dissident groups sought to revise representational arrangements or when disputes occurred over the precedence of custom over legal procedures.

In January 1936, a new planning group was set up to coordinate the work of the bureau with the Soil Conservation Service on the reservations, called the Technical CooperationBureau of Indian Affairs (TC-BIA). The objective of TC-BIA, according to Walter Woehlke, Collier's choice as the project coordinator, was "to outline the best possible use of the reservation's resources, a use which will bring the human carrying capacity on the reservation to its maximum, with complete conservation of the reservation's soil resources and with maintenance of an adequate standard of living." Initial planning was carried out on an experimental basis on the Papago, Pima, and Hualapai reservations in New Mexico.

1/30

Mekeel, as head of applied anthropology activities, was placed in charge of the SocioEconomic Division of TC-BIA, which was to work in conjunction with agricultural economists, geologists, and other technical specialists from SCS carrying out intensive surveys of selected reservations. Mekeel described the function of his division: "to determine... the potentialities and limitations of the Indian population on each reservation in terms of its own economic system, its own standard of living as well as its economic drives"; and to ensure that resource use plans would strengthen traditional social and economic institutions and "foster the life-values of the people."31 Elaborate procedures for the work were developed, including house-to-house surveys, a technique refined and extended by the Department of Agriculture for more wide-ranging rural economic projects. The survey also used conventional statistical studies of population,

30 Walter V. Woehlke, "SCS Project for Technical Assistance to the Office of Indian Affairs,” Jan. 7, 1936. Records of Technical Assistance-Bureau of Indian Affairs project, Records of the Soil Conservation Service, Record Group 114, National Archives (cited hereafter as RG 114, NA).

31 H. S. Mekeel, memo, Jan. 1936, RG 114, NA.

income, and other social characteristics.32 Among the social scientists participating were Willard W. Hill, Frederica de Laguna, and Ruth Underhill, all of whom had done ethnographic studies of Indians.

The TC-BIA project marked a high point in the use of anthropologists by Collier. A year after the project was initiated, the applied anthropology staff was disbanded. Although the first TC-BLA surveys were completed and others initiated on thirty-five reservations in the Southwest and Plains regions, few of the planning proposals originated by the SocioEconomic Division went any further, and the work of TC-BIA as a whole was interrupted by the onset of World War II. Even before the war, serious difficulties had emerged in applying the planning group's recommendations. The underlying concept had been to develop economic projects on the reservations which would encourage Indians to participate because they would fit into the normal framework of tribal activities rather than being simply the imposition of an alien society. In practice, however, neither the bureau nor SCS were prepared to give priority to these proposals over more ambitious plans drawn up by the technical staffs.33

This situation fits the conventional view of relations within the bureau as portrayed by Mekeel, Kluckohn, and Hackenberg. Proposals by the reformers for tailoring new programs to traditional Indian practices, based on research performed by social scientists, were rejected or ignored by technical staff and field administrators who preferred to rely on more orthodox plans initiated and dominated by whites, while excluding Indians from any participation except as laborers. But differences in views and practices between the reformers and the anthropologists, differences that had been gradually crystallizing during the work on Indian reorganization, also emerged in the development of the TC-BIA.

32 See Rensis Likert, "Democracy in Agriculture-Why and How," Farmers in a Changing World, Yearbook of Agriculture (Washington, 1940), pp. 994-1002, on the development of survey research in the federal government. The surveys predated Likert's Division of Program Surveys in the Department of Agriculture by two years.

33 Alan G. Harper, coordinator, TC-BIA, to Woehlke, Apr. 25, 1938, Collier Papers; Harper, "Planning for the Economic Independence of Indians," paper delivered at the National Conference on Social Work, Buffalo, N.Y., June 22, 1939, Collier Papers.

Three months after the initial surveys began, Collier's office received complaints from field agencies about the anthropologists, and he asked Woehlke to investigate.34 Woehlke's response was a bitter attack on the social scientists involved in the survey, whose work, he asserted, was based "on a pseudo-technique through which immunity or superiority is maintained at the expense of reality." The anthropologists were not making a systematic effort to gather information and as a group they appeared hostile both to Indians and to local bureau employees. Somewhat inconsistently he singled out Ruth Underhill for having "developed a proprietary interest in the Papagos and Pimas," presumably at the cost of objectivity, 35

This incident indicates the low opinion of the social scientists held by Woehlke, one of the men closest to Collier in the Indian Service, a veteran of the reform movement with a definite interest in the success of the project and by no means an old guard administrator with an ax to grind. To some extent this unhappy encounter could be attributed to inexperience on the part of the anthropologists in this type of policy-directed research and with the methods of anthropologists. The rift created by the TCBIA between reformers and anthropologists, however, was never completely healed. In a confidential letter written to Gordon MacGregor after the termination of the applied anthropology staff, Allan G. Harper, Woehlke's successor at TC-BIA, intimated that Mekeel and his colleagues "through the inept handling of a rare opportunity" had "discredited anthropology in the Indian Service." 36

Collier's opinion was important in this critical area because his reformer aides reflected his own view of the role of social scientists in the reorganization program. Collier has sometimes been mistakenly identified as an anthropologist. He was not, but he did have a background in sociology, had taught applied social science at San Francisco State Teachers College in the 1920s and became a professor of sociology after retiring from the Indian service in 1945.37

34 Collier to Woehlke, Apr. 18, 1936, Collier Papers. 35 Woehlke to Collier, Apr. 22, 1936, Collier Papers.

36 Harper to Gordon MacGregor, Apr. 19, 1938, RG 114, NA. 37 Collier discussed his intellectual background in From Every Zenith, pp. 68-76. He is incorrectly described as an anthropologist in Robert Burnette and John Koster, The Road to Wounded Knee (New York, 1974), p. 115.

In the course of the tribal organization effort, Collier sought to clarify his own conception of the role of anthropologists, analyzing incoming reports on the basis of their methods and usefulness, and circulating his comments. The report of one hapless consultant anthropologist on the Blackfeet was used as an example of a poor methodology producing useless results: In general the investigator seems to have considered that all facts which came to his attention were equally subject to being passed on by himself out of some kind of inner equipment, knowledge or wisdom. Factors economic, biological, cultural, governmental, moral- they are all on the same plane. The result is a general essay on the Blackfeet and their situation which is forcused on nothing in particular. 38

He went on to express doubts whether "even a mature and thoroughly equipped anthropologist. could produce what we need, working alone. There is needed a focus of varied techniques upon specific problems within limited areas.' #39

Despite this pessimism, Collier reacted favorably to a report by Morris Opler on the San Carlos Apache: "Opler proceeds from a discussion of surviving culture patterns to a discussion of [tribal] organization and economic planning." The discussion of culture patterns is given clinical application to a specific case in which the emphasis by bureau officials on cattle breeding to the detriment of traditional small-scale communal farming was eradicating remaining tribal institutions among these Indians. The report was enhanced by the fact that "all of [its] factual statements are so definite that they can be corroborated or found faulty, and the report . . . requires administrative action if the facts and interpretations be found valid."40

There were several common threads running through the critical remarks on the work of anthropologists in the Indian program. First was the orientation toward problems and problem-solving as the determinant of research. Collier and his advisers were not interested in descriptive studies, even those with important implications for theoretical issues, unless they were addressed to immediate problems on which action could be taken. This 38 Collier, "Comment on Blackfeet Report by Mr. [David] Rodnick," Oct. 6, 1936, Tribal Organization files, RG 75, NA. 39 Ibid.

40 Collier, "Comment on Report by M. D. Opler on Indian Organization and Related Problems at San Carlos," Oct. 7, 1936, San Carlos file, Tribal Organization files, RG 75, NA.

is a rather commonplace observation about the differences between pure and applied science and deserves further investigation.

The dominant approach to research in cultural anthropology in this era was that of Franz Boas who shunned generalization and emphasized a descriptive, eclectic study of cultural groups. Reacting against a generation of amateurish theorizing in anthropology, Boas trained his students in the inductive approach and never attempted to synthesize his own research results. Furthermore, insofar as there was a Boas theory it stressed the unity of culture and the dangers involved in extracting elements from this unified whole for the purpose of analysis leading to generalization.41

The impact of this approach on anthropological research techniques has been vividly described:

Boas' emphasis on systematic fieldwork led to the collection of whatever data became available.... This exhaustive collection which seems at the time to have little or no connection with any specific problem is peculiarly a feature of the natural history approach

There is a fascination in following the details of a subject just for its intrinsic interest. . . . Masses of data may therefore be worked over with no clear knowledge of what is to be gained at the end.42 This description resembles closely the kind of research Collier criticized as being "focused on nothing in particular."

The point is important because Indian militants of the present, such as Vine DeLoria, Jr., echo the criticisms of the reformers of the Collier era that much of the work of anthropologists among Indians has been of little direct benefit to Indian policy and represents a waste of time and funds that would be better spent on the economic rehabilitation of Indians.43 This charge, regardless of its accuracy, reveals the continuing gap between the social scientist and the policy-oriented reformer.

A second point of difference between anthropologists and reformers related to the goals of the Indian reorganization program. The Indian New Deal was erected on the premise

41 Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968), pp. 277-289.

42 M. G. Smith, "Boas' 'Natural History' Approach to Field Method," in W. Goldschmidt, ed., The Anthropology of Franz Boas (Washington, 1959), p. 54.

43 Vine V. DeLoria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins (New York, 1968), pp. 91-98. DeLoria included in his charge the works on MacGregor, Thompson, et al., that Collier had sponsored in 1941-45 to generate direct policy proposals from anthropological research.

that traditional Indian tribal groups were strong enough so that with encouragement from the Indian service they could take over the tasks of administration and economic organization. The mission of the anthropologist was to identify these traditional groups and to ensure that the bureau did not inadvertently undermine them as it undertook to improve the economic status of the Indian. But the premise that tribes did exist and could be revitalized went unquestioned. The anthropologist in the field who found that the particular situation did not fit the premise faced a dilemma since this task in the administrative system was defined by an assumption contrary to fact.

The clearest example of this dilemma involved Louis Balsam and the Minnesota Chippewa. Balsam was an anthropologist from Clark University in Massachusetts who had studied the Navaho in the Southwest. After working with the applied anthropology staff on tribal organization in several regions, Balsam was sent to Minnesota to investigate the problems encountered by the bureau in organizing the scattered Chippewa settlements. Balsam's conclusions were that the Chippewa in no way constituted a tribe, that most of the Indians were completely assimilated into neighboring white communities and that "many mixed bloods are Indians for revenue solely," that is, in order to qualify for tribal annuities and allotments. He recommended that the bureau undertake to help Indians needing jobs to relocate to Minneapolis-St. Paul and other urban centers and that the management of Indian Affairs for those who remained be transferred to the state government.44

Balsam's proposals were not accepted by Collier and he was transferred to the Colville reservation in Oregon where he subsequently performed well as agency superintendent. The problem of organizing the Minnesota Chippewa was not resolved and three years later Archie Phinney, an Indian who had studied with Franz Boas before entering the bureau,

44 Louis Balsam to Collier, Feb. 11, 1939, Collier Papers. These proposals resemble the national program designed for Indians after 1952, which was applied most thoroughly to the Klamath Indians of Washington state and the Menominee Indians of Wisconsin, with devastating results for those better-organized tribes. Balsam's recommendations were not the best solution to the problem, but represented an effort to deal with a situation in which the underlying assumptions of the Indian reorganization program apparently did not apply.

reiterated Balsam's comments on the absence of tribal cohesion among the Chippewa, and further argued that the imposition of a basically artificial tribal government had done little to improve the condition of most of the Indians.45

H. S. Mekeel faced a similar problem with the Dakota Sioux. Initially he was enthusiastic about the development of tribal organizations based on traditional local kinship groups called "tiospaye." Mekeel reluctantly concluded, however, after several months of investigation in 1935, that on the Pine Ridge reservation, inhabited by descendants of Red Cloud's followers, any effort to establish tribal council electoral districts on the basis of the tiospaye would create too much friction among already divided Indians. There the process of land allotment had wrecked traditional tribal institutions to the extent that any effort to revitalize them would create as many problems as it solved.46 The Sioux reservations were the scene of recurrent, virtually insoluble difficulties relating to tribal organization throughout the Collier era.

At the same time, in areas where Indian cultural groups remained strong, anthropologists were able to work effectively with other bureau officials and to contribute their knowledge directly to the development of reorganization policy. Among Indian groups in the Southwest such as the Papago, Hopi, Pueblo, and Navaho, effective cooperation between reformers and social scientists was particularly marked. The work of Oliver LaFarge on tribal organization with the Hopi in Arizona was one of the best examples of this kind of cooperation.

LaFarge was well known as a novelist and Indian reformer; in 1930 he won the Pulitzer Prize for Laughing Boy, a novel about Indians. He was elected president of the National Association on Indian Affairs, which in 1937 merged with Collier's Indian Defense Association to form the Association on American Indian Affairs. LaFarge was also a trained ethnologist who had studied Indian tribes of the American Southwest as well as the ancient Meso-Ameri

45 Archie Phinney to Collier, Aug. 30, 1942. Tribal Organizatior. records, RG 75, NA. Phinney did not repeat Balsam's recommendations, but urged that greater attention be expended on local community organizations rather than on tribal councils.

46 Mekeel to Collier, Oct. 31, 1935, Pine Ridge file, Tribal Organization files, RG 75, NA.