Dillon S. Myer Quotes
It will not always be possible to obtain Indian cooperation .... We must proceed even though [this] may be lacking.
Dillon S. Myer, 1891-1982, Commissioner, U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, Instructions to staff, 1951
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The Chairman and the tribe had invited the Federal Government to use part of their reservation as a toxic waste dump for nuclear materials, deciding that the economic benefit was worth the risk. The governor of Utah and many other whites objected, not wanting nuclear waste stored or traveling through Utah.
French Canadian separatists had begun a movement for an independent Quebec. The area that was to be an independent nation, however, included the land of several Indian tribes including the Cree. They insisted on the same right of self-determination within Quebec as the French Canadians claimed within Canada. Their opposition among others led to the failure of the Meech Lake Accord.
Justifying selling part of the reservation as a waste dump to the distress of neighbors:
In 1937 the U. S. Treasury Department commissioned a pair of large murals to decorate the lobby or the Ariel Rios Federal Building in Washington DC. On the mural was depicted a U. S. Mail Service from Alaska to Puerto Rico. It showed four Puerto Rican women reading a letter in the Inuit dialect presumably delivered from Alaska. The authorities loved the mural until they discovered the translation of the Inuit letter. This was a direct reference to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Independence Movement. That year 18 Puerto Rican Nationalists were killed and over 100 wounded when police fired into a crowd of demonstrators on March 21. Kent, a famous artist, planted a newspaper story with the translation and soon media all over the company were drawing attention to the Puerto Rican movement, just as Kent had intended.
The Chief Secretary, Lord Castleregh, had put forward a resolution to bring about the unification of Great Britain and Ireland under the single British Parliament at Westminster. He and his allies had bribed a number of the Irish MPs to support the union. With Union some Irish MPs would then be able to win seats representing Ireland in the British Parliament. Although Grattan and most of the Orangemen opposed the Union, 4 months later, the bill passed comfortably. Ironically, Grattan was one of the Irish MPs whose popularity won a seat in the unified British Parliament.
Dillon Seymour Myer was a United States government official who served as Director of the War Relocation Authority, Director of the Federal Public Housing Authority, and Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He also served as President of the Institute of Inter-American Affairs. He is the subject of Keeper of Concentration Camps: Dillon S. Myer and American Racism by Richard T. Drinnon.
