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Problem of Indian Administration

an outstanding success or someone who was an equally outstanding failure.

Visiting Homes and Schools to Observe Work with Girls and Family Life. The specialist in family life and the activities of women had a most varied and difficult assignment. At the schools she was primarily concerned with the work done by and for girls. This embraced not only the formal education given them in academic subjects, in domestic arts and science, and in training for definite occupations, such as teaching, nursing, and clerical work, but also their industrial work in the school and that most difficult and intangible subject, the effect of the school upon them and their relationship to the white persons with whom they came in close contact, especially teachers and matrons. She had to consider not only what they were formally taught but also what they got indirectly as training for the life which was ahead of them. She had to visit and talk with the teachers and matrons, attend class rooms, spend sometime in the domestic science and arts classes, study the production work in cooking and sewing, inspect the girls’ living quarters and determine the conditions under which they live and especially the discipline, leadership, and recreation, and wherever possible to talk with the Indian girls themselves and with Indian women employed in the school or living at or near it. On the reservation her problem was to talk with the field matrons, field nurses, farmers, superintendents, and others to learn what was being done for women, girls, and families, to visit as many families as possible and to talk with Indian women and girls in their own homes to get their point of view and to see for herself the conditions under which they lived. So many comments had been made regarding the difficulties of interviewing Indian women and getting them to talk, that the members of the survey staff were much surprised at the quiet cordiality and friendliness with which they were received by the Indian mothers. Kipling’s observation that the Colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under the skin is of wider application; it extends across lines of race. Miss Mark has had wide experience in interviewing different classes of women, the poor of urban communities, immigrants, negroes, and native mountain whites in the Appalachian hills; and she found the Indian women, if anything, more approachable if allowance is made for the difficulties of language. Possibly the greatest difficulty encountered was in