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"They Are Ancestral Homelands": Race, Place, and Politics in Cold War Native America, 1945–1961
Paul C. Rosier
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.... A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future.
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| —Ernest Renan, "What is a Nation," 1882 |
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Our land is everything to us. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes talk the Cheyenne language to each other. It is the only place in the world where Cheyennes remember the same things together. I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember our grandfathers paid for it—with their life.
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| —John Woodenlegs, "Speech to the Association on American Indian Affairs," 1960 |
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| The authors of "The International Reason" section of the October 1947 report of the President's Committee on Civil Rights noted that in the United States government's battle for hearts and minds worldwide, "our domestic civil rights shortcomings are a serious obstacle.... Those with competing philosophies have stressed and are shamelessly distorting our shortcomings. They have not only tried to create hostility toward us among specific nations, races and religious groups. They have tried to prove our democracy an empty fraud, and our nation a consistent oppressor of underprivileged people." As the historian Thomas Borstelmann has argued, "There was no greater weakness for the United States in waging the Cold War than inequality and discrimination." Indeed, the Soviet Union and its satellites offered a stream of criticism of American race relations into the 1960s and beyond. For example, a Moscow radio broadcast of February 1958 declared that American Indians, "the most underprivileged people in the United States," were forced to live on reservations that the Soviet commentator called "huge concentration camps.... Today, gradual extinction is the fate of the people in these reservations." Ironically, Soviet propagandists had much in common with U.S. officials, as they too called Indian reservations "concentration camps." But the Soviets misread U.S. officials' efforts to contain ethnic difference when they charged that the U.S. government imprisoned Native Americans on reservations against their will.1 |
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During the termination era (broadly, 1944–1970), federal officials attempted to dismantle the reservation system and relocate Native Americans in "mainstream" American society. While officials' motives ranged from the criminal to the well-meaning—to strip Indians of valuable tribal property in the American West, to eliminate expensive federal programs, to end guardianship restrictions on liquor and firearms purchases, to further long-standing assimilation policies, and to adjudicate hundreds of land claims—the termination agenda serves as an example of the Cold War imperative of ethnic "integration." The discourse of termination was that of the Cold War—the avowed goal was to "liberate" the enslaved peoples of the world, who, according to American cold warriors, included Indians "confined" in "concentration camps" or "socialistic environments." The influential terminationist Sen. Arthur Watkins, a Republican from Utah, championed his "Indian freedom program" with an emphatic call for liberating Native Americans from their reservation prisons: "Following in the footsteps of the Emancipation Proclamation of ninety-four years ago, I see the following words embellished in letters of fire above the heads of the Indians—THESE PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE." In 1953 House Concurrent Resolution 108 codified Congress's intent to terminate "Federal supervision and control" of Indian affairs by making American Indians "subject to the same laws and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities" as other American citizens. Federal officials subsequently attempted to terminate treaty-based federal Indian policies through legislation that unilaterally stripped individual tribes of their sovereignty, without Native Americans' consent.2 |
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