The State of Indians in 1968 (1968)

begins to feel the effects of those people. I have very little time to discuss with you an extremely complex problem. I'd be so bold as to say more complex even than the problems of the Negro and the Mexican American. We all, I suppose, see things through our own narrow perspective and perhaps my perspective is narrowed over the last year but I think because of the invasion of their lands, the annihilation, physical annihilation of the people which has occurred in this country including California because of the strong clash of cultures because of the fact that unlike any other group, the Indians are this very day in 1968 subject to a special agency of government, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. For all of those and many other reasons, I think that their problems are more complex, more subtle, more elusive than any other minority group. I certainly am only beginning to understand some of them.

I would like to take just a minute to briefly give you some idea of how many Indians there are in the United States and California and so that you'll have some general background because I think the Indian has been dehumanized through television, through the movies, through books, through life magazine, and so on. And we always think of the Indian as a savage, perhaps noble, perhaps not, a symbol, but never a flesh and blood human being with individual differences and personality. So let me try to give you some background on that. In the United States as a whole, there are approximately 550,000 Indians, 380,000 or so live on reservations. In the state of California, there are approximately 40,000 native California Indians, 30,000 in the rural parts of the state, and of those only about 7,000 actually reside

on reservations. There are, in the state of California, over 100 Indian lands. Many of you, as I was the case with me, when I started, I'm sure don't know that, but there are many reservations in the state of California. In fact, there is over half a million acres of Indian land in this state. Those Indian lands are dispersed throughout the state, and they range in size from one small reservation and small reservations in this state for simplicity are known as rancherias. The size of one acre up to the Hoopah Reservation in Humboldt County of 86,000 acres. The people residing on these lands range from as few as one person to as many as 800 or 900 people on the Hoopah Reservation. There's a state advisory commission on Indian Affairs in California, and in February of 1966, they issued a report on Indians in rural and reservation areas.

It's a very comprehensive report, goes into all aspects of the living conditions of the Indians in the rural parts of the state. And again, perhaps I'm viewing things through an hour perspective, but that report documents how by every standard health, housing, education, employment, the Indian stands at the bottom. Also on March 6th of this year, President Johnson delivered a special message to Congress on Indian Affairs. And he said, this is, of course, in national terms, 50,000 Indian families live in unsanitary, dilapidated dwellings, many in huts, shanties, even abandoned automobiles. The unemployment rate among Indians is nearly 40%. More than 10 times the national average. 50% of Indian school children double the national average dropout before completing high school.

The California report points out the three times as many Indian children dropout before completing high school as compared to non-Indians. The average age of death of an American Indian today is 44 years. For all other Americans, it is 65. That's the President's message. And there are, of course, many other details, but this is not the time to go into those. The Indian, particularly in the rural parts of the state, like any other minority group, suffers from racism. We have encountered numerous examples of discrimination in jury selection, discrimination in governmental services, such as school buses, police protection, other municipal services, exclusion from unions, exclusion from government employment and other employment, and so on down the line. Everything you can say about the Negro and the Mexican American