World War II drew tens of thousands of Native Americans (American Indians) from their reservation communities to factories across the United States and to battlefields around the world. During the war the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) formed to assert Native Americans’ rights in the postwar period. Federal officials viewed Native Americans’ wartime migration and military service as evidence that they wanted to leave their reservations, leading to a congressional campaign to “terminate” reservations, which were deemed “socialistic environments,” and relocate Native Americans to “mainstream” American society. This campaign and resistance to it by the NCAI and other groups dominated Indian-white relations during the period from 1946 to 1968.
Motives for termination of American Indian sovereignty varied. Federal, state, and corporate officials wanted
Native Americans’ valuable land and mineral resources in the expanding American West. Members of Congress sought to eliminate Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) programs as part of a Republican Party backlash against the New Deal programs of the 1930s. Influenced by the cold war culture of conformity, politicians also wanted to restore 19th-century assimilation policies that the Indian New Deal of the 1930s had rejected. Finally, federal officials wanted to resolve hundreds of land claims, both to provide justice to Native Americans and to eliminate legal barriers to termination.
In August 1946, the U. S. Congress established the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) to adjudicate American Indians’ claims for a century’s worth of fraudulent land cessions and treaty violations. From 611 separate cases, the ICC distributed roughly $657 million to Indian nations before it disbanded in 1978, though attorney fees took nearly one-third of the awards. Working to secure just compensation in these ICC cases helped to strengthen Native Americans’ legal resistance to federal termination policies.
Congress began to terminate American Indian sovereignty in 1953 by adopting House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 108 and passing Public Law 280, which transferred jurisdictional control over Indian affairs to five state governments. And it attempted to legislatively terminate tribes protected by federal treaties. In the late 1950s the Menominee of Wisconsin and the Klamath of Oregon were “terminated,” with their tribal assets distributed in per capita payments. Although many Klamath supported termination, federal officials forced the Menominee to accept termination; as a result, Congress restored the Menominee’s tribal status in 1973.
Congress also funded the Voluntary Relocation Program to persuade Native Americans to leave reservations for urban centers such as Chicago, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Minneapolis. Between 1950 and 1970, roughly 160,000 Native Americans left reservations under this program. Like many minority migrants to cities, American Indians faced discrimination in housing and employment, police brutality, and poor health care. As a result, many American Indians returned to their reservation homes. For those who stayed, urban cultural centers such as the American Indian Center of Chicago provided services to help them adjust to city life and activities such as pow-wows that created new pan-tribal communities that sustained their Indian identities.
For many Native Americans, including those who relocated to cities, the federal government’s termination agenda represented a campaign to extinguish their Indian culture. They viewed the reservation as an “ancestral homeland,” a place of sacred cultural sites, of burial grounds, of spiritual significance. Losing their land meant losing their future as American Indians. Activists for treaty rights argued that treaties signed by their ancestors and the federal government during the 19th century protected their right to live on reservations.
Native American perspectives during the period 1946-68 also evolved within the international contexts of the cold war and decolonization. Using cold war rhetoric that positioned America as a defender of minority rights, American Indian leaders defended their right to be both American and Indian, in part by claiming that termination damaged the United States’s image abroad. Native leaders also sought the development of their reservations through domestic versions of the Marshall Plan, which provided aid to European countries, and Point Four, a similar aid program directed to “underdeveloped areas” in the emerging cold war battlegrounds of Asia and Africa.
This campaign culminated in 1957 with the promotion of Senate bill S.809, “An American Indian Point Four Program,” but Congress refused to approve it because it remained committed to termination and resisted extending sovereign status to American Indian nations along the lines of emerging Third World nations.
Native American nationalism found expression in other forums, in particular the American Indian Chicago Conference (AICC). More than 450 Native Americans from 90 American Indian nations gathered in Chicago in June 1961 to shape the “New Frontier” of 1960s Indian-white relations. The AICC produced the Declaration of Indian Purpose, which expressed AICC delegates’ patriotic belief in “the future of a greater America. . . where life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be a reality.” It also drew on cold war contexts by asking for a Point Four plan and reminding U. S. officials that the world watched how the United States treated its minority people.
The AICC revealed the diverse and divided nature of Native America. Some Native Americans embraced assimilation while others held fast to traditional customs and ceremonies; many more reflected a hybrid identity that combined both American and Indian ways of living. Younger activists such as Mel Thom, Clyde Warrior, and Shirley Witt rejected the moderate views of AICC planners and articulated a Red Power agenda that drew from Third World liberation movements and the civil rights strategies of African-American activists. The NIYC’s goal, as Thom put it in the NIYC’s newsletter American Aborigine, was not the AICC’s “greater America” but a “greater Indian America.”
Inspired by the Seneca Nation’s opposition to the construction of the Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania, which abrogated the Pickering Treaty of 1794, the NIYC sought to protect American Indian treaty rights through fish-in protests and to preserve American Indian identity through workshops and pan-tribal gatherings. In 1968 the American Indian Movement (AIM) emerged from the Native ghettos of Minneapolis to broaden the Red Power movement. The racist violence of the Vietnam War deepened many American Indians’ distrust of the U. S. government and furthered their identification with Third World liberation movements.
NIYC and AIM activists’ efforts to protect Native lands and to promote Indian identity generated the sensational news coverage. But other Native activists worked quietly in the background during the 1960s to develop industrial and educational programs on reservations by working through the federal government’s Office of Economic Opportunity and other Great Society initiatives that situated authority in Native communities. For example, the Navajo established the Rough Rock Demonstration School in 1966 and then founded the Navajo Community College in 1968, the first of many schools developed and controlled by American Indian community leaders.
These American Indian activists, both young and old, both modern and traditional, planted the seeds of Native self-determination that would find legislative and judicial expression in the 1970s. A series of presidential orders, Supreme Court decisions, and congressional acts of legislation rejected the policy of termination and restored to Native communities sovereign powers that protected their American Indian identity and preserved the boundaries of the reservations that sustained it.
Further reading: Thomas W. Cowger, The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York: MacMillan, 1969); Troy Johnson, Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Joane Nagel, eds., Red Power: The American Indians’ Fight for Freedom, 2d ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); James B. LaGrand, Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945-1975 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002).
—Paul C. Rosier
World History
