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Sacred Sites and Repatriation (Contemporary Native American Issues)

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This was required reading for a graduate course in American history.

Paul C. Rosier examines the efforts of a number of Native American individuals and organizations to combat the efforts of the federal government to enforce a public policy of "termination," i.e., the dismantling of the reservation system and to relocate and compel Native Americans, through a variety of strategies into the mainstream of American society. For Rosier, the termination agenda was an example of the Cold War imperative to bring about ethnic integration. In the language of termination advocated, the goal of the Cold War was to "liberate" the enslaved peoples of the world. This included reservation Indians, who were who were thought as being confined in "concentration camps" and "socialist environments" which were considered confining, racialized, and emasculating spaces. Unfortunately, these descriptions misrepresented the increasingly hybrid nature of Native American institutions and identities In 1953, House Concurrent Resolution 108 stated Congress' intent to terminate Federal supervision and control of Indian affairs by making American Indians subject to the same laws, entitled to the same rights and privileges as other American citizens. Subsequently, Federal officials attempted to terminate treaty-based federal Indian policies through legislation

that unilaterally stripped individual tribes of their sovereignty, without tribal consent. That the termination policy slowed and eventually ended was due to the politicization of Native Americans who mobilized across tribal lines to protest termination legislation through the press and Congress. It is Rosier's contention that the termination effort in the context of the Cold War was responsible for fostering an international perspective among Native American activists who drew upon postwar decolonization movements and Cold War nation-building and connected them to domestic concerns over treaty rights, the definitions of democracy and freedom, the meaning of American citizenship and all that it entailed. By the end of the 1950s, a broad spectrum of Native American activists had embraced a Cold War conception of civil rights that was based on viewing treaties as instruments of tribal sovereignty and nationhood. By giving the fight against termination legislation an internationalist context, Native American leaders and organizations like the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) were able with some exceptions (e.g., the federal Voluntary Relocation Program) to eventually halt the wholesale legislative termination of reservation sovereignty. The June 1961 meeting of the American Indian Chicago Conference was a seminal event that put forth the idea of "place-based identities" for Native Americans, with the reservation at its heart. However, the 1960s also brought an ideological and generational split in the methods and mentality of Native American activists. A new generation would become radicalized when they perceived that Cold War-era nation building, the goal of an older generation, had bypassed the Indian nations; it would be replaced by a more tenuous proposition, the idea of a "greater Indian America."

Recommended reading for anyone interested in American history, civil rights history.