Termination

What happened

Termination was the federal policy of ending the special relationship between the United States and selected tribes. It was announced in House Concurrent Resolution 108, passed August 1, 1953. The resolution declared it the sense of Congress that, at the earliest possible time, all tribes and individual members in California, Florida, New York and Texas, plus named tribes including the Flathead, Klamath, Menominee, Potawatomi and some Turtle Mountain Chippewa, should be freed from federal supervision and control.

The National Archives describes the consequences. Termination ended federal recognition of affected tribes and the services that came with it, ended federal trust status for the reservations, and in many cases transferred criminal and civil jurisdiction to state authorities. Public Law 280, enacted August 15, 1953, did this for most reservations in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon and Wisconsin. The Archives says that from 1953 until 1970 Congress initiated 60 separate termination proceedings and over three million acres of tribal lands were relinquished. Other counts exist.

In the same decades, a separate federal project took reservation land. A 2010 Senate report says the Pick-Sloan dams, built from the mid-1940s to 1966, flooded about 356,254 acres of tribal lands of seven tribes and forced more than 900 Indian families to relocate.

The Archives says the Nixon administration repudiated termination in 1970 and shifted toward self-determination.

Good to know. Totals differ among sources; the 60 proceedings and three million acres are the National Archives' count. The Pick-Sloan dams were a water project, not a termination law.

Summarized with AI assistance from 4 sources and checked against their words; not yet reviewed by historians or by the nations. Report an error