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Show ANNUAL REPORT OF THE COMMISSIONER OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. DEPARTMENOFT THE INTERIOR, OFFICEC OMM~SIONOFE UIN DIAAFNFA IRS, TVashington, September 1$,191$. SIR: I have the honor to hand you the Eighty-first Annual Report of the Office of Indian Affairs. A DECADE OF INDIAN AFFAIRS. In 1902,77,000 letters were received by the Indian Office, which to conduct its correspondence had 132 employees; in 1911,209,000 letters were received and there were 227 employees; in other words, the vol-ume of correspondence had increased almost threefold, whereas the number of employees had not increased twofold. Even these figures do not nearly represent the added responsibilities of the office, for in the last 10 years Indian Office affairs have taken on a magnitude, a breadth, and a detail which are significant of a real attempt to master the Indian problem by preparing the Indians to leave their status of wardship, at last to lose their anomalous character as a people set apart and to join their white neighbors in the body of American citizenship. For the recent development of the Government's policy, legislation in the early years of the decade of the eighties, tardily extending to Indians protection of thecriminal law, and in the late eighties, giving general authority in the Dawes Act for allotting tribal lands in severalty, prepared the way. But for 15 years after the general allot-ment act was passed its benefits fell far short of its promise, for the essential purpose of the statute was perverted, since under the act of February 28, ,1891 (26 Stats., 794), Indians who had received allot-ments were able to take the line of least resistance by leasing their lands to white farmers and by continuing to live quite after their former fashion. Thus it happens that present policies are compara-tively of recent development-the policies which center upon indi-vidual Indians and individual Indian families, seeking to give each Indian the health and the knowledge of health which will enable him to associate and to compete with his fellow Americans, to place' each Indian upon a piece of land of his own where he can by his own efforts support himself and his family, or to give him an equivalent opportunity in industry or trade, and to lead him to coaserve and utilize his property as means to these ends rather th'an to have it as 5 |
