‘Indians Robbed, Pauperized, Killed by U.S. Government Agent’ from the Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 5. March 12, 1929.

Charges that 225,000 Indians living as government wards on reservations are being looted of lands, oil, timber and water rights worth millions and are being saddled with debts which they cannot pay, are made by Vera L. Connolly, investigator, in an article published in “Good Housekeeping” for March.

The article is one of a series written after she visited reservations in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin and California.

She charges that millions of dollars worth of highway and waterway improvements for the benefit of whites have been charged against the Indians for payments.

Middle Rio Grande Steal.

“The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico are facing a desperate crisis,” she writes. “Because of a contract made between the interior department and the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the six tribes have just been loaded down with a charge of $825,938 for flood control work needed by the city of Albuquerque and other towns on the Rio Grande–but of no advantage to the Indians.”

Speaking of the Klamath Indians of northern California and Oregon she writes:

“The Klamaths who have always been great cattle breeders, can no longer raise cattle, for they have no range. The range has been mined. In spite of the protest of the entire tribe, the range was leased to white sheep men for three years, it has been eaten out by the sheep to the fences.”

Starving Children.

The article refers to a series of the most brazen cruelties, all with an economic motive to Indian children in government schools. With the bright idea of “civilizing” the Indian children, they are torn away from their families at the age of six, and held in government boarding schools until they are sixteen or eighteen.

These schools, with some exceptions seem to be virtual slave pens where the children are starved, beaten, forced to wear iron balls and chains for punishment, confined in underground dungeons, crippled by work in laundry, and in at least one case, harnessed to plow like horses and prodded with sharp sticks when they tired of this heavy labor. In a running series of reports on Indian schools, these items occur with monotonous regularity: “Breakfast was oatmeal without sugar or milk, bread without butter, and coffee.” It seems to have been a staple meal. And there never enough. Actual starvation in the Indian schools, was the rule.

Most Indians are poor, in only a few reservations have oil or mineral resources been found. Actual starvation, cases in which Indians starved to death, and were mere skin and bone when the women washed them for burial, are recorded.

The heavy burden of guilt lies on the Indian Bureau administration for its neglect of health. It creates conditions, close school prisons, cramped quarters on reservations, where it is not possible for the tribe to move from a polluted camping ground, or to isolate its infectious sick in any way; and then, without medical help, for the doctors of the Indian Bureau are, according to the investigator, the worst in the world, derelicts afflicted with dope habits many of them, the Indian suffer a series of epidemics.

At Walpi, Arizona, a whole town of Pueblo Indians had a skin disease, a curable skin disease. Tuberculosis and trachoma rage unchecked in most Indian reservation.

The article says:

At Pine Ridge, South Dakota, an investigator recently discovered two physicians serving 7,800 Indians scattered over 2,400 square miles. In the western Navajo jurisdiction one serves 8,000 Indians scattered over 5,000 square miles. At Soboba, in southern California, Dr. Allan F. Gillihan, who was making a survey for the state board of health, found one doctor serving 1500 Indians, his territory extending 100 miles to the east of the hospital and 25 miles to the west and south. Dr. Gillihan had previously surveyed conditions in northeastern California. He offered the following conclusions regarding the California Indians:

Kill Four Out of Five.

“1. That the ill treatment of the Indians during the past 70 years has resulted in reducing the population from over 100,000 to about 17,300.

“2. That the Indians are now living a hand-to-mouth existence. (a) In houses not fit to live in (b) Upon land that is useless. (c) Without Water.

“3. That they are not receiving an education worthy of the name.

“4. That a great deal of sickness exists among them, and they are receiving absolutely no care.

“5. That they are not receiving any advice, assistance, or encouragement in their business dealings with the outside world or in the personal side of their lives or in the lives and health of their families.”

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1929/1929-ny/v06-n005-NY-mar-12-1929-DW-LOC.pdf