In an attempt to learn wherein the laws and courts of the United States government coincide or conflict with such a local pueblo organization as has been outlined in Chapter XI, I have read the annual reports of the Commissioner for Indian affairs from 1854 to 1920, but with no very satisfactory result. Up to 1875, apparently, the only resource the Indian agents had, when crimes and disorders occurred, was military force. In 1915, murder, assault with intention to kill, arson, and burglary were under the jurisdiction of American courts, but the commissioner stated that our citizens were not thus safeguarded against many other misdemeanors, some of a serious nature. This dual control results in a divided allegiance in government as in religion among the pueblo peoples and must induce infinite difficulties on the one hand and deceptions that are truly deplorable on the other. Throughout these Reports, however, it is interesting and gratifying to find that praise of the Pueblo Indians is almost universal. They are described by commissioner after commissioner as being as “different from the Indians of the Plains as light from darkness,” or “as men of a wholly different race.” The adjectives “loyal,” “generous,” “honest,” “industrious,” “amiable,” “eminently self-supporting,” are constantly used to describe the village peoples. In 1867 the commissioner regrets that since the “marauding Indians” have to be placated so often, “these very friendly and deserving people” have become “ill at ease” and distrustful of our government agents because our promises to them are not kept. In 1874, the commissioner protests that the failure to produce order among the Indians is “largely attributable to the fundamental failure to treat the Indian as a man capable of civilization and therefore a proper subject of the Government and amenable to its laws. At the same time tribal government has virtually broken down by contact with the United States” and he specifically recommends “qualified citizenship.” In 1915 Cato Sells, the commissioner, writes: “The Indian has demonstrated his capacity for intellectual and moral progress amid conditions not always propitious,” and in 1917 he declares that the time has come “for discontinuing guardianship of all competent Indians and giving closer attention to the incompetent so as to fit them to transact their own affairs and control their property.” Such a procedure would leave the Indian assured of full personal rights, quite free to work out his own destiny, while relieving the government of a large number of wards and placing at the same time, before those Indians left under guardianship, an incentive for progress and true ideals of citizenship. [Illustration: A NAVAJO HOGAN _Bolton_]