ABSTRACT
The Credit Committee also dispensed monies from various grants given to the Community in its early years of tribal reorganization. The tribal reorganization of the Stockbridge-Munsee was the result of various vital forces working together. What made it possible for the Stockbridge-Munsee to reorganize during the 1930s was the confluence of many interdependent factors, of which John Collier and his agents of reform were only one. Like the Iroquois Sidney Harring described, the Stockbridge-Munsees, long surrounded by whites, serve as a vivid reminder that Native American cultural persistence and renewal were not limited to isolated western reservations. Historians of federal Indian policy during the New Deal era have examined in some detail the apex of the pyramid of power and decision-making over Native American life, scrutinizing John Collier’s utopian vision of tribal restoration and his methods for achieving it.
