OCR Text |
Show Life? In the first place, the Institute should serve as a center to carry forward a dissemination of information among the various countries concerning the vital, cultural and economic statistics, trends of the Indian populations and the ideas, methods, legislative programs, etc., dealing with the Indians, developed by each of the countries. Within the governmental activity there fall in one or another place the school systems, health systems, schemes of agricultural credit, schemes of cooperative organizations, schemes of dealing with the whole complex of Indian tribal or community life, as under the Indian Reorganization Act of the United States, and in the ejidos of Mexico. Particular items of governmental policy are rich with implications, as, for example, the Indian in relation to alcohol, the Indian in relation to arts and crafts, the place of Indian custom law in its civil, criminal, and social aspects in relation to the national and local systems of statute laws. Then, in the field of Indian economic life the whole subject of the protection of Indian labor, Indian land tenure, Indian land use practices, the relationship of these to the conservation or wastage of natural resources, the relation of the Indian to the economy of the several countries - these and many other aspects of Indian economic life should feed into the Institute from every source, and out again from the Institute to all of the governments and people concerned with the welfare of the Indian. As one of its early and continuing uses, the Institute should serve as a clearing house of statistics concerning Indians, constituting itself a bureau of information for governments, societies, or persons interested in any aspect of Indian life or culture in the Americas. Elemental in |