premise, you had to believe that written promises made to a tribe in a treaty were just empty words.
The policy of termination was a disaster. Wisconsin’s Menominee Tribe was terminated in 1961 and quickly transformed from one of the richest tribes in the country to one of the poorest. A lumber mill that had been a source of jobs could not keep up with the need for new equipment. A reservation hospital that lost its federal funding had to close. Across the board, schools and other institutions were hit by a sudden loss of support and either scaled back or closed. When Menominee termination began, the tribes had assets exceeding $10 million. By 1964 the treasury had shrunk to $300,000. Termination resulted in almost instant poverty.
(The tribe eventually was restored under an Act of Congress signed into law by Richard Nixon in 1973. But the damage of termination had been done.)
So for American Indians and Alaska Natives the idea of civil rights included a foundation of permanence, a recognition that tribal governments existed prior to the United States. It was a demand to respect sovereignty, not just equal representation under the law.
“The civil rights of Indian people are best understood, therefore, by separating them into two broad categories. The first category deals with those matters that we ordinarily think about as civil rights,” wrote Kevin Gover and W. Richard West in the book, “Indians in American History.” And the second category includes the rights of individual Indian members as “members of tribal bodies politic.”
As Gover and West wrote, “Indian demands were the same as those of other minorities in terms of the rights of citizenship. In another respect, however, they were fundamentally different. Indians asserted not only their constitutional rights as members of the American body politic but also their right to maintain distinct political and cultural communities. In short, Indians were asserting a right to be different.”
One example of that difference and the complicated nature of the Civil Rights Act further added restrictions to American Indian legal system,
By Mark Trahant
For American Indians, ‘64 Bill Was Justice Delayed
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To me, dissent is the essence of civil society; it’s just like oil in an engine. Without oil, the engine will be destroyed. Without dissent, our democracy won’t survive. Tribes get that. And have for centuries.
Photo courtesy of Mark Trahant.