Review: Indians of the Americas

Indians of the Americas by John Collier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Collier came into Bureau of Indian affairs with FDR. He gives about half of his book over to detail of the tragedy of European interdiction into aboriginal cultures in the more populated South and Central American cultures; Inca, Aztec, etc. He then covers from earliest Europeans in the more thinly populated continent of North American and covers the litany of abuses from the earliest colonial times to the scandal-ridden Harding administration and Albert B. Fall, Senator from New Mexico and the Secretary of the Interior. This includes a few pages of detail on The Native American Church (NAC), a Native American religion that teaches a combination of traditional Native American beliefs and Christianity, with sacramental use of the peyote. He is particularly objective and even respectful of this development.

This brings things to his time, which he sees as a period of (finally) healthy Indian-government relations, particularly around livestock management and economic self-sufficiency.

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