ject of the cultures of peoples. Where this involvement is not recognized,
and a deep understanding of culture is not made a part of the admin-
istering enterprise, trusteeship miscarries and Point Four endeavor will
fail. Positively stated--where cultural norms are identified, and cultural
dynamics are wisely made use of, brilliant success with minimum cost
in money and in human values is achieved. The century behind us has
assumed, tacitly or explicitly, that governmental and economic enter-
prise on one hand and human culture on the other, have little relation
to each other. Enterprise, it was assumed, could proceed in a cultural
vacuum, or at most, an ethnocentically conceived cultural flatland.
The decades ahead will be an epoch of the rediscovery of the funda-
mental and inescapable importance of culture in all of human enter-
prise, and specifically in trusteeship and developmental enterprise.

The task of uniting governmental process with cultural process can-
not be pursued successfully in terms of unimplemented generalities. To
yield precise significant results, it must be pursued experimentally in
relation to the day-by-day problems of policy and practice which face
administrators in specific local communities. We may discover and
perfect scientific instruments in the fields of government and welfare
only by meticulous case studies and experiments into precisely defined
scientific problems relevant to administrators' needs.

This book presents such a case study. It is one of the products of the
Indian Personality and Administration Research, a long-range, multi-
discipline policy project jointly sponsored by the United States Office
of Indian Affairs and the University of Chicago's Committee on Human
Development, succeeded later by the Society for Applied Anthropology.

The aim of the research was to study the Indians both as individual
personalities and as tribal societies in order to discover by scientific
inquiry, how the effectiveness of Indian Service long-range policy and
program might be increased from the standpoint of improving Indian
welfare and developing responsible local autonomy. Obviously this was
a difficult assignment and one requiring, for its successful completion,
the translation of a complex problematic situation into a scientific
problem and the development and implementation of a theoretical ap-
proach and methodology adequate to the solution of the problem in all

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