Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas W. Cowger. The National Congress of American Indians: The Founding Years. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1999. Pp. xiii, 217. $45.00.

Movements to abolish national and cultural identities are worldwide phenomena. The process takes a variety of forms. Colonial powers frequently confront indigenous populations, and the colonialists employ a full panoply of formal and informal means from genocide, enforced poverty, land confiscation, and prohibitive attacks on culture to assimilative statutes to destroy the will of the native population. The United States in its history with Native Americans has tried all of these methods and more, and one of its more reprehensible recent attempts—that of termination—is just beginning to receive a fuller historical treatment.	1
Actually, the adoption of a formal policy to end American Indian tribes by the U.S. government was first termed "liquidation." Stopping federal relationships with Native Americans had been a goal of numerous American state and national politicians and intellectuals and a few Indian leaders since the late nineteenth century, but in the era during and immediately after World War II, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) with encouragement from selected congressmen started to formalize a "liquidation" program. Once the horrors of World War II became fully known to the American people, a new name, not a new approach, was chosen. "Termination" replaced "liquidation." The end result, however, was to abolish Indian tribes, reservations, and treaty relationships and to incorporate the "former" Indians completely into American society. Beginning with approval by Congress in August 1953 of Concurrent Resolution 108, requiring the Secretary of the Interior to submit legislation to carry out the termination of selected tribes, termination as an official federal policy was implemented from 1954 to 1966, when the last termination legislation, that for the Northern Poncas of Nebraska, was enforced. Although not nearly as ambitious a program as a number of federal officials and Congressmen had hoped, still 109 tribes and bands were terminated and over 11,000 Native Americans lost over 1.3 million acres of land by the end of the movement.	2
The first professional book-length studies about the history of termination include Donald Fixico's Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960 (1986) and Larry W. Burt's Tribalism in Crisis: Federal Indian Policy, 1953–1961 (1982). Together with a comprehensive survey of this very complex federal policy, "Evolution of the Termination Policy," by Charles F. Wilkinson and Eric R. Biggs (American Indian Law Review [1977]: 139–184), these works provide the basis for understanding how the termination movement came about and how it was implemented. There remained a nagging question to be explored in depth: how did the people whose very existence and identity were fundamentally threatened respond? That question is addressed for tribes and individuals by Kenneth R. Philp and for the largest national Native American organization, the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) by Thomas W. Cowger.	. . .