The Lakota Sioux outrage white ranchers when they levy a tax on all non-Indians leasing land on South
Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. The ranchers fight the tax in federal court, where their lawyer angrily claims the Lakota are behaving like a “foreign nation.” Judge George T. Mickelson agrees, maintaining they have every right to do so. Finding for the Lakota, he states that Indian tribes are “sovereign powers and as sovereign powers can levy taxes.”
The Dalles Dam destroys Celilo Falls.
Construction on the Dalles Dam on the Columbia River floods the ancient spiritual and trading center at Celilo Falls. For thousands of years, this area has been sacred to many northwestern Indian groups, including the Umatilla, Nez Perce, Yakama, and Warm Springs Indians. Destroyed as well are important fishing sites guaranteed to these groups by treaty.
“The Pacific Northwest is renowned for its natural beauty and livability, but the riches of our homeland are being spent without conscience or regard for its long history of its people. . . . The unconscionable drowning of Wyam—Celilo Falls—marks a crucial point in our collective history. It destroyed a major cultural site and rent a multi-millennial relationship of a people to a place. . . . It was like a mother, nourishing us, and is remembered as a place of great peace.”
—Warm Springs-Wasco-Navajo poet Elizabeth Woody on the cultural meaning of the flooding of Celilo Falls
Congress passes the Lumbee Recognition Act.
After years of requests for acknowledgment from the federal government, the Lumbee Indians of North Carolina are formally recognized by an act of Congress. The act, however, specifically bars the Lumbee from receiving federal funds and services offered to other tribes. The legislation will prompt a series of legal battles, through which the Lumbee and other North Carolina groups will seek the full benefits of recognition.
World History
