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dirt, because they have not learned to adapt themselves to life in a permanent house. Building houses for Indians as is sometimes done, in a locality itself lacking in sanitary efficiency, without providing home demonstration or other social workers to carry on an educational campaign to assist them in fitting themselves to the new situation, is a waste of money.
The most important single item affecting health is probably the food supply. Whatever the situation may have been in the past, the Indian is now given, whether as rationer or as pupil in a government school, a very poorly balanced ration. Consequently when he becomes able to select his own diet, he neither raises on his farm nor buys from the trader a diet superior to that which for years perhaps has been imposed on him. In too many instances his lands are so poor that he cannot depend upon them for his food production.
At the boarding schools the food supply is more regular, but its excess of starches and meat have been a factor in retarding the development in the Indian of a taste for vegetables and milk. It is extremely serious that the government has not inculcated better food habits. The cause has been primarily that the government has not allowed sufficient funds with which to feed these children. Doubt has been expressed as to whether, until recent years, the government has given adequate thought to this problem or if it has recognized in the operation of Indian schools that diet and nutrition must be dealt with by technicians in this field if the maximum of health is to be secured, in the long run, at a minimum cost. Only within the past few years have even a few among the government schools provided an average of one pint of milk a day for each child. Some are not now providing any fresh milk or butter.
The history of alcohol and the Indian goes back to his first contact with the white man. The liquor problem apparently was of some importance in all the jurisdictions visited in this survey, excepting certain pueblos. In most instances the supply came from the oustide. “Canned heat” and commercial liquor are secured from whites.
Certain tribes prepare fermented drinks from berries, corn, or pine bark brewed in earthen jars long used for the purpose and thus retaining in their pores organisms causing fermentation. Certain infusions of leaves or roots of various herbs are also drunk.