In 1945 the official governmental policies of the United States began a twenty-year period known as the Termination Era. As with many earlier government policies, Indians were rarely consulted. Termination was intended to end Indian reservations and eradicate American Indian cultures so that Indians could be fully assimilated into a mythical mainstream American culture.
In an article in Chronicles of Oklahoma, historian Richard Lowitt writes:
“This new approach was intended to make Indians, as rapidly as possible, subject to the same laws and entitled to the same rights and responsibilities that pertained to all other American citizens.”
In the philosophy of termination, American Indian cultures were considered to be irrelevant at best and anti-American at worst. In a chapter in The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Montana, 1800-2000, David Miller writes:
“Reservations were considered the product of separate and unequal treatment, with little understanding of what treaties or negotiated executive agreements meant to Indian people.”
The termination idea was to force individual Indians to assimilate into mainstream, English-speaking, Christian American society by getting rid of Indian reservations; by terminating all treaty obligations to Indian nations; and by terminating all government programs intended to aid Indians.
With little understanding of the historical, cultural, and legal basis of reservations, the proponents of termination viewed reservations as a form of segregation which retarded the assimilation of individual Indians.
Termination was intended to dismantle the reservation system, to transfer the natural resource wealth of the reservations to private non-Indian corporations, and to place Indians at the mercy of local state and county governments. Historian Katrine Barber, in her book Death of Celilo Falls, summarizes termination this way:
“Termination required that the federal government relinquish its responsibility to Indian nations and shift those to state and county governments. Terminationists hoped to dismantle the reservation system and get the federal government ‘out of the Indian business.’”
In an article in The Conversation, Kerri Malloy reports:
“Officially, this policy ended the tribes’ status as wards of the United States in order ‘to grant them all of the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship.’”
Former U.S. Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell wrote:
“In Washington’s infinite wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that they had been tribes for thousands of years.”
The Nez Perce Tribe put it this way:
“This era marked another abrupt change in what can only be described as a schizophrenic federal Indian policy.”
The inspiration for the termination argument stemmed in part from a sense of innate superiority by non-Indians, and in part it involved money. It would be cheaper for the United States, which was now heavily committed to rebuilding the war-torn countries and economies of their former enemies, to do away with treaty rights, tribal governments, and support for Indian programs. In his chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 8: California, Edward Castillo writes:
“After the war, as the United States spent millions of dollars rebuilding Germany and Japan, the government hoped to rid itself of its embarrassing failure to ‘rebuild’ Indian nations by simply withdrawing government aid to Indian people.”
In his essay in American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, former Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell explains that the idea at the time was:
“If we get rid of ‘tribes,’ we can avoid responsibility to individual Indians and save lots of money.”
Under termination reservation lands could be sold and would be subject to local property taxes, a concept strongly supported by local governments which had traditionally been anti-Indian.
Following World War II, the United States underwent a massive housing boom. This meant that there was an increased demand for natural resources, particularly timber. Many of the tribes which were initially selected for termination had valuable timber and mineral resources. With termination, these resources could be privatized—that is, transferred from the public domain to the ownership of large corporations—and then developed.
Termination was set against the backdrop of the Cold War in which the United States saw itself as being involved in a deadly struggle against Communism to maintain its way of life. Historian Mark Miller, in his book Forgotten Tribes: Unrecognized Indians and the Federal Acknowledgment Process, writes:
“Caught up in the growing Cold War hysteria of the time, many Americans again viewed Indians as aliens and even equated tribalism with communism and anti-Americanism.”
In her book American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture, sociologist Joane Nagel writes that during the termination era:
“…federal Indian policy remained frozen in the policy mold stamped during a conservative cold war-period policy epoch that stressed patriotism, American individual initiative, and national unity and pride.”
During this period, the distinctiveness of American Indians was seen as being un-American. Historian Thomas Cowger, in his book The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years, puts it this way:
“The anticommunist spirit of postwar America demanded conformity and tended to discourage the preservation of Indian culture and the communal lifestyle of Indians.”
In his book The Qualla Cherokee: Surviving in Two Worlds, sociologist Laurence French writes:
“Termination emerged as the McCarthy era solution to Indian communism.”
He goes on to say:
“This solution was designed to force American Indians into a capitalist corporation environment thereby forcing them to compete within the larger dominant society.”
Failure would, of course, clearly indicate that Indians are morally and genetically inferior.
In the anti-Communist hysteria of the time, many people viewed Indians as aliens and viewed tribal ownership of land as a form of Communism and therefore un-American. To be Indian with a distinct history and culture was viewed as anti-American.
Another aspect of termination was a political philosophy of states’ rights: often used as a shorthand designation giving tacit approval to racial discrimination. Returning to the anti-Indian racism of the nineteenth century, Indians would have little support from local governments. In his chapter in The Impact of Indian History on the Teaching of United States History, historian Alvin Josephy writes:
“Prominent among the complainers were the aggrandizing interests, still coveting Indian lands and resources, and urging the end of reservations, tribes, treaties, and trust protections, and the turning over of Indians and their possessions to the jurisdiction of the states.”
In their chapter in The Impact of Indian History on the Teaching of United States History, Richard West and Kevin Gover write:
“Much of this unhappiness was rooted in simple racism, but some was based on the fact that non-Indian businessmen no longer had free reign to plunder reservation resources.”
Many of the promoters of termination viewed Indian reservations as a form of racial segregation. Historian Warren Metcalf, in his book Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah, writes:
“Many commentators of the 1950s took the position that preserving Indian culture on reservations was really an insidious form of segregation.”
The cry used by those who wished to return to assimilation and to terminate the relationship between the tribes and the federal government was “Free the Indian.” In order to free Indians from federal control, it was first necessary to destroy the tribal governments.
While the mood of the post-war Congresses was clearly in favor of assimilation and termination, the first strong step toward assimilation as the official policy of the United States came in 1952 with House Joint Resolution 698. This resolution called for an examination into the conduct of Indian affairs and a list of tribes which were sufficiently prepared for termination. Tribes subject to termination were supposed to have attained a significant degree of acculturation, to be economically self-supporting, and to be willing to accept the termination of government services. In response to the resolution, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) developed an extensive questionnaire for BIA officials to use in evaluating each tribe. The resulting report reflected the judgment of reservation superintendents and BIA staff.
The following year, House Concurrent Resolution 108 called for the formal termination of Indian tribes. The writers of the resolution apparently were unaware that Indians are citizens (Congress had granted all Indians full citizenship in1924 and again in 1940) and that they were not “wards of the state”. Again, as usual, Indians were not consulted. The Resolution specifically expressed the intent of Congress as supporting unilateral withdrawal from its treaty obligations to Native Americans as soon as possible.
Members of Congress were particularly interested in opening up Indian lands for sale and taxation, particularly if those lands contained valuable natural resources such as timber. The Klamath and the Menominee, whose reservations included valuable timberlands, were specifically singled out for early termination.
In response to this resolution, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) held an emergency meeting in Washington, D.C. in an attempt to block the legislation. According to NCAI President Joe Garry (Coeur d’Alene):
“Most of the pending legislation, if passed, would result in the end of our last holdings on this continent and destroy our dignity and distinction as the first inhabitants of this rich land.”
Apache tribal leader Clarence Wesley told the NCAI delegates:
“Either the United States government will recognize its treaty and statute obligations to the Indians . . . or we will continue down the bitter road toward complete destruction.”
The End of Termination
In 1970, President Richard Nixon asked Congress to pass a resolution repudiating termination. He told Congress:
“Because termination is morally and legally unacceptable, because it produces bad practical results, and because the mere threat of termination tends to discourage greater self-sufficiency among Indian groups, I am asking the Congress to pass a new Concurrent Resolution which would expressly renounce, repudiate and repeal the termination policy as expressed in House Concurrent Resolution 108 of the 83rd Congress.”
Since the end of termination, many of the terminated tribes have been recognized again by the United States government. Some of the terminated have state recognition but not federal recognition. Many of the terminated tribes are landless.
Summarizing the Impact of Termination
Between 1945 and 1960 Congress terminated more than one hundred tribes and small bands. This action left these groups with the same legal status as the unrecognized tribes. In his chapter in American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, Kevin Grover sums up termination this way:
“Some 11,500 Indians lost their legal status as Indians, and nearly 1.4 million acres of land lost its status as trust land.”
In an article in the Oregon Historical Quarterly, anthropologist Patrick Haynal reports:
“Terminated tribes may have maintained their legal status as sovereign governments, but they no longer passed or enforced laws and were unable to exercise their power to act as governments.”
Historian Thomas Cowger notes:
“Termination, in actuality, affected only a relatively small number of Indians, but it aroused tremendous fear and hostility throughout Indian country.”
None of the terminated tribes improved economically: in most cases the impact of termination was to increase poverty. In her chapter in American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, law professor Rebecca Tsosie writes:
“Without fail, the tribes selected for termination suffered terribly, being divested of valuable reservation lands as well as the political identity that sustained their survival as distinct nations within the United States.”
On the other hand, many non-Indians became wealthy through this process and many corporations gained a great deal of wealth. In his introduction to A History of Utah’s American Indians, Forrest Cuch summarizes the various attempts at termination this way:
“They proved to be of benefit to land-grabbing non-Indians but a miserable failure resulting in poverty for those tribes terminated, with the loss of thousands of acres of land on the part of individual Indians and their tribes.”
In their book The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, Vine Deloria and Clifford Lytle write:
“We can mark out the two decades from 1945 to 1965 as the barren years. Self-government virtually disappeared as a policy and as a topic of interest. Indian affairs became a minor element in the American domestic scene; Indians became subject to new forms of social engineering, which conceived of them as a domestic racial minority, not as distinct political entities with a long history of specific legal claims against the United States.”
Former Commissioner of Indian Affairs Philleo Nash would later write:
“The termination era may appear as a unique event, a failed experiment that was soon corrected. But termination was actually an expression of the national will that the ultimate goal of government policy toward Indians was ‘assimilation.’”
In his book Deadliest Enemies: Law and the Making of Race Relations on and off Rosebud Reservation, Thomas Biolsi summarizes termination this way:
“The termination period was characterized by the goal of terminating the special legal status of Indian people and Indian tribes and assimilating them into the nation.”
In his book Command of the Waters: Iron Triangles, Federal Water Development, and Indian Water, Daniel McCool simply states:
“The 1950s was a bad decade for American Indians.”
More 20th Century American Indian Histories
Often the 20th century is a forgotten era in American Indian histories. Many American history books never mention Indians in the 20th century, leaving readers with an impression that Indians are relicts of the past who have disappeared from America. Here are a few 20th century histories:
Indians 301: American Indians and World War I
Indians 101: The Last Great Indian Council (1909)
Indians 101: American Indians and the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition
Indians 101: World War II Veterans Come Home
Indians 101: Changing Federal Indian Policies Through the Indian Reorganization Act
Indians 101: Indians, Iwo Jima, and the American Flag
Indians 101: Boulder Dam and the Navajo Reservation
Indians 101: The Navajo, Sheep, and the Federal Government
