John Collier (May 4, 1884 - May 8, 1968) was an American social reformer and Native American advocate. He served as Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the President Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, from 1933-1945. He is considered chiefly responsible for the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which he intended to correct some of the problems in federal policy toward Native Americans. It was considered to aid in ending the loss of reservations lands held by Indians, and making some progress for enabling tribal nations to re-institute self-government.
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John Collier grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, where his father Charles Collier was a prominent banker, businessman, and civic leader. He was educated at Columbia University and at the Collège de France in Paris. At Columbia, Collier began to develop a social philosophy that would shape his later work on behalf of American Indians. He was concerned with the adverse effects of the industrial age on mankind. He thought society was becoming too individualistic and argued that American culture needed to reestablish a sense of community and responsibility.
Collier centered his career on trying to realize the power of social institutions to make and modify personalities. In 1908, Collier made his first significant contribution to a national magazine; his article describing the socialist municipal government in Milwaukee, Wisconsin was published in Harper's Weekly. Collier moved to California in October 1919.
That year Collier first encountered American Indians while visiting a friend, the artist Mabel Dodge, at the Taos Pueblo in Taos, New Mexico. For much of the next two years, he spent time at an art colony near Taos, where he studied the history and current life of American Indians. By the time Collier left Taos in 1921 for a teaching job in San Francisco, he believed that Indians and their culture were threatened by the encroachment of the dominant white culture and policies directed at their assimilation.
He rejected the contemporary policies of forced assimilation and Americanization. He began to work for the acceptance of cultural pluralism to enable Native American tribes to preserve their own cultures. Collier believed Indian survival was based on their retention of their land bases. He lobbied for repeal of what was generally known as the Dawes Act, Indian General Allotment Act of 1887. It had been directed at Indian assimilation by allotting Indian reservation land into individual household parcels of private property. Some communal lands were retained, but the US government declared other lands "surplus" to Indian needs and sold them privately, much reducing reservation holdings.
Collier believed that the general allotments of Indian reservation land was a complete failure that led to the increasing loss of Indian land. He emerged as a federal Indian policy reformer in 1922, and strongly criticized the Bureau of Indian Affairs policies and implementation of the Dawes Act. Prior to Collier, criticism of BIA had been directed at corrupt and incompetent officials rather than the policies. For the next decade, Collier fought against legislation and policies that were detrimental to the well-being of Native Americans and was associated with the American Indian Defense Association.
His work led Congress to commission a study in 1926-1927 of the overall condition of Indians in the United States. The results were called the Meriam Report. Published in 1928 as The Problem of Indian Administration, the Meriam Report revealed the failures of federal Indian policies and how they had contributed to severe problems with Indian education, health, and poverty.
Publication of the Meriam Report in 1928 and Collier's efforts raised the visibility of American Indian issues within the federal government. As a result of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression, economic and social conditions worsened for most Americans, including Native Americans. The administration of President Herbert Hoover reorganized the BIA and provided it with major funding increases.
At the urging of Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, who knew Collier personally, President Franklin D. Roosevelt nominated John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933. Collier set up the Indian Civilian Conservation Corps as a branch of the CCC. The Corps provided jobs to Native Americans in soil erosion control, reforestation, range development, and other public works projects and benefited some of their reservation lands.
Collier introduced what became known as the Indian New Deal with Congress' passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. It was one of the most influential and lasting pieces of legislation relating to federal Indian policy. Also known as the Wheeler-Howard Act, this legislation reversed fifty years of assimilation policies by emphasizing Indian self-determination and a return of communal Indian land which was in direct contrast with the objectives of the Indian General Allotment Act of 1887. Collier was also responsible for getting the Johnson-O'Malley Act passed which allowed the Secretary of the Interior to sign contracts with state governments in an effort to share responsibility for the social and economic well-being of American Indians. While Collier emphasized and vocally expressed support for Indian self-determination, his Indian New Deal policies were often seen by American Indians as just another paternalistic program forced upon them by the federal government. Criticism aside, John Collier did more to protect John Collier and resigned as [[Commissioner of Indian Affairs].
Collier remained active as the director of the National Indian Institute and as a sociology professor at the College of the City of New York. John Collier died in 1968 in Taos, New Mexico, at age 84.
John Collier was the father of John Collier, Jr. (1913—1992), an anthropologist and photographer. John Collier's father was Charles Collier (1848—1900), the Mayor of Atlanta in the 1890s.