Lewis, David, Termination of the Confederated tribes of the Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, Department of Anthropology, University of Oregon, Dissertation, 2008. (Pre-final draft, 2007)
Chapter 11
Conclusion
White Americans are concerned about rights, while Native Americans are more concerned about responsibilities. Roberta Connor, Director Tamaskilist Museum, Confederated tribes of the Umatilla, Willamette University, February 1, 2008
Chapter Outline
This chapter draws together many of the strands of thought presented in this research. Discussed are the resultant effects of termination, including urban Indians and efforts for restoration. Finally, the socio-political situation of the Grand Ronde tribe is related to other decolonization scholarship from American Indian and other Indigenous scholars.
Discussion
In looking back at termination, it is impossible to assign one clear event or reason that caused the event to occur for Oregon Indians. It is more correct to assume that termination was the culmination of many events, and of many politicians working to solve individual problems. Termination of Indians became the answer to these problems and a final solution to the “Indian problem.”
We can assign specific intentions to certain politicians. Douglas McKay wanted to help secure the Klamath timberlands and eliminate the Klamath tribe’s water rights so that long-standing plans of resource exploitation in agreements between the states of Oregon and California would be successful (Fixico 1998). Other Oregon politicians, like Richard Neuberger and Wayne Morse, also worked for these goals believing that the Klamath timberlands would help revive the Oregon economy. This was a politically popular stance to take for politicians in Oregon.
Additionally, the argument that Congress developed, that of “freedom”, while exploitative of the other racial freedom issues of the time, was truly effective amongst many tribes. The argument plays upon the dreams and desires of Indian people for a complete freedom from continued government mismanagement and relief from the parallel oppressive on Indians. This in turn is part of the global indigenous dream for de-colonization and for healing from the various psychological and socio-economic trauma of the colonization of “Indian Country” by the United States and other imperial powers. Part of this desire is fully realized in a popular comedic expression used when critiquing the phrase “post-colonial”, native people quip the obvious question, “What, have they left yet?” (Smith 1999). Realizing that this will never happen, as such a return would not solve any of the problems, and likely create additional problems, indigenous people can only laugh at such a joke understanding that colonization is still occurring and much of it is still being perpetrated by the dominant society.
It is a reality that tribes knew well that they were not living as many other Americans, and as the Umatilla, Klamath and Grand Ronde representatives pointed out in the 1934 and 1950 conferences with Oregon state leaders, that there were prejudicial, discriminatory laws applied to Indians in Oregon, that did not apply to most other peoples (Affairs 1934; McKay 1950). The idea that Indians could not buy alcohol like other Americans was contradictory to their status as American citizens, a status gained from the 1924 Indian Citizenship law. Additional laws in Oregon, the restriction on Indians marrying whites, and across the nation, disallowance of claiming social security, and restaurant exclusionary laws, provided a discriminatory environment that was not welcoming to many natives seeking to leave the reservations (McKay 1950).
Perhaps the biggest contradiction is the way that Indian tribes are thought of and treated as ethnic groups, when they needed to be treated by the United States as tribal governments possessing individual sovereign rights as governmental entities. Tribes maintain legal and political relationships within the United States and deserve to be treated as such. Much of the history of U.S. Indian policy and in the termination proceedings of the 1950s do not recognize the sovereign status of tribes. The way that tribes were manipulated and at times extorted to approve termination in exchange for Indian Claims settlements shows that the Federal government did not desire to respect those relationships in the least.
At the same time, the attempts to manipulate hundreds of tribal nations using offerings of “freedom” were a deplorable manipulation by the Federal government. The strategy of using this is akin to the methods used to colonize the “New World” by European and American countries. Promises of a better more civilized life do not make that life better without changes in society. When Indians were terminated, the assumption was that they would assimilate into American society, and no longer be Indians. However, what this produced was several generations of completely disenfranchised peoples who where rejected by white American society as being different, and who were likewise ostracized by non-terminated Indians who felt that terminated Indians had sold out. Terminated Indians were rejected by these populations and felt alienated from their native identity within their traditional homelands. The constant stress on tribal cultural identity has caused continued psychological and social declines for terminated and formerly terminated Indians in American society.
Perhaps the rejection of terminated Indians by other tribes was the most terrible action of all. In a contradiction that spans over 200 years, Tribes have been horribly manipulated by the federal government through strategies of disenfranchisement, neglect, and mismanagement. But somehow, in the 20th century, the societal norm for many tribes became living on a reservation as the true expression of a “real Indian.” The realities of many reservation environmental and social conditions are dreadfully degrading to Indians. For many reservations poverty is common, and tribal societies are struggling to survive and many people strive to move away because of politics, alcohol and drug abuse, and to gain greater access to education and work. Today, more natives of federally recognized tribes live in cities than on reservations. Yet despite these facts, natives from reservations who were never terminated, have maintain erroneous assumptions about restored tribes, and continue to form assumptions regarding how “Indian” they are, and whether they possess legitimate claims to their traditional homelands, and other similar issues.
In traditional tribal culture, when natives chose to move away from their homelands other tribes could legitimately claim those lands. One of the assumptions by tribes surrounding Grand Ronde is that the tribal members had a choice in their removal to the reservation, and in whether the tribe would be terminated. It has been established in this research that the Grand Ronde tribe had no choice in either of these issues. Removal to Grand Ronde was not a alternative because the other option was genocide. The ”option” of termination was not a decision the tribe held. This choice was removed by agents of the BIA. The Grand Ronde tribe was terminated without members’ approval of the stipulations of the termination act. In fact, it is likely that the tribe would not have approved termination if they had been given a chance to truly voice their opinions. In any case, the Grand Ronde tribe never had a chance to freely agree to relinquish their rights.
A contradiction is that living on a reservation can be a barrier to Indians accessing and fully appreciating American society. For some Indians, reservations are essential places to preserving traditional society. This may be true and necessary for the continuation of a tribe’s cultural traditions. Political currents in America have shifted and in American society there is more of an acceptance of people being themselves and practicing their own cultures. More than fifty percent of Native Americans live in urban settings and tribes need to work to re-envision what this means in the tribal societal structure.
The discussion of this paradox will not come to any conclusion or solution here, as it is about the nature of being Indian in American society. However, a re-evaluation is necessary by tribes and native individuals about what role they are to play in American society, as essential elements, and as Native peoples. This discussion should also happen at all levels of society as we enter into the next generation. Termination of the tribes may be re-examined for how the nature of tribal society was irrevocably altered by termination. For formerly terminated tribes, there may never again be a time when there is a quantity of tribal members alive who remember the era.
The western Oregon tribes were terminated at the same time as the Klamath tribe because they were in the first wave of the termination legislative acts, and were listed as assimilated Indians by Congress. These small tribes could not effectively mount a defense against the Congressional acts and their agreement to continue to discuss the issue contributed to the assumption that they wanted to be terminated. Tribes who fought termination, like Umatilla and Warm Springs, successfully halted their own termination.
Contrastively, the western Oregon Tribes may be partially implicit in their own termination. As we have seen, the western Oregon tribes did not mount a political defense, did not actively speak out against termination and many of their representatives sincerely believed that termination was the best thing for their communities. Tribal leaders assumed that they would retain their reservation timber lands and individual allotments and they would then be able to manage these lands to the benefit of their communities. This assumption was grown from the original discussions about termination undertaken by the BIA with the tribes. Many promises were made during this time by BIA Indian Agents. Most of the promises did not occur in the final act. At the most, the tribal leaders’ lack of political savvy is their only error.
For other tribes facing termination, those more understanding about how they could manipulate their political status, they were able to maintain their property. The Menominee, for one, was allowed to maintain their timberlands, and manage these as a corporation. In fact their former reservation became a state county. But, the communities in western Oregon did not have the same political clout, and did not or could not pursue this direction in their community decision process and so they lost nearly all community lands. There are clear differences in the two situations, as the western Oregon tribes did not have a great volume of timberlands, while the Menominee did. The Grand Ronde Tribe had never had an opportunity to develop wealth to the extent that Menominee had. That wealth, the ability to manage it and the political savvy to hold onto it was the difference.
Urban Indians
The ostracizing of the terminated tribes was not complete, and many of the terminated tribal members chose to remove to the cities and go to school taking advantage of the federal programs. There, they joined an expanding diaspora of American Indians taking advantage of the same federal programs and those who had moved because of a need to survive economically. These people became the Urban Indians. The urban Indians formed community ethnic groups, societies, and associations. The work begun with boarding schools of mixing different Indians together in the schools, continued in the cities. These community groups melded their cultural traditions and established new Pow wow traditions. Many of the urban Indians gathered at universities and colleges and in the late 1960s established native student organizations. In addition, the urban Indians manned the Indian education associations and parents committees which take advantage of the Federal Title VII program funds.[1] Many of the urban Indian groups activated to restore tribes and created programs to help Indians and other minorities with education, social needs, and alcohol and drug abuse. The restoration of the terminated tribes and their cultures was seen as a solution to the major issues of poverty and lack of access to social programs facing the terminated Indians (Coiner 2006; Tom 2006).
In Oregon, Indians at the University of Oregon formed the Native American Student Union in 1968, and helped create the Office of Multicultural Affairs in the early 1970s (Tom 2006). Many of these Indians were members of western Oregon tribes and formed alliances with non-Indian social activists and community workers who worked on reporting the effects of termination on the tribes. They were the major organizers and advocates on behalf of the western Oregon Indians who testified in front of the Task Force on Terminated and non-Reservation Indians in 1975 in Salem, Oregon (Coiner 2006; Tom 2006).
Since the restorations of the tribes, many of these Indian activists took positions within the restored tribes in the administration of their education and governance programs. In the past 30 years since the first western Oregon restoration of the Siletz tribe, the urban Indian populations have been returning to the Siletz and Grand Ronde reservations and to the traditional lands closer to the newly recognized tribes of Cow Creek, Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw, and Coquille native peoples.[2]
Restoration
When we look at the restoration of the Oregon tribes, some major questions are implicit. The most important question is why were the western Oregon tribes allowed to be restored? This question has no logical answer in an economic sense to the federal government. The reasons for the federal pursuit of termination are very clear; it made economic sense to pursue termination. However, the reasons for restoration are not so clear because when tribes become federally recognized, funding for administration and services then costs the government considerable annual overhead. Many tribal elders remain confused by this question, but for those that were involved in the restoration efforts, the reason is always “it was the right thing to do.”
What exactly does this mean? From the tribal perspective, the restoration of the government and the culture is the right thing to do, as the tribes can then begin to develop some control over their destiny. In the 29 years that the tribe was terminated, the United States had disposed the Grand Ronde tribal members so that many were living in complete social and economic poverty for many generations. Tribal culture and society was terribly degraded and even after 20 years, many people did not have access to state social or health services. Tribal activists, in the 1970s, took advantage of the renewed sympathy for racial minorities, as there were a number of ethnic social movements at the time, and convinced Oregon politicians to support the restoration of the tribes and the repealing of the termination acts. In addition, the statements from two presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, ended further termination of tribes.
The Grand Ronde community’s restoration is almost completely supported through the actions of conservative leaders, Bob Packwood (who sponsored the bill), Les Aucoin, Governor Victor Atiyah, and President Ronald Reagan (who signed the restoration act) and later President George Bush Sr. (who signed the reservation act).[3] This remains a complete reversal of the former call for the termination of the tribes in the 1950’s, when Oregon politicians, Senators Wayne Morse and Richard Neuberger, and Governor, later Secretary of the Interior, Douglas McKay, led the way for the termination of the tribes. During this time Richard Nixon presided over the Senate during termination in 1954.
Continuous efforts on the part of dedicated tribal leadership and their growing network of politicians brought the restoration of the Grand Ronde tribe to a reality. Sympathy garnered from the plight of Indians in the United States, and education of politicians through histories and films from the tribes and from scholars like Stephen Dow Beckham also helped. Added to this, the House of Representatives initiated its Task Force studies of Indian country. Task Force Ten studied terminated and unrecognized Indians in the United States. The final report for Task Force Ten used oral testimony and government records to make the case that termination had impoverished the tribes such that they were in a worse situation than ever before.
Grand Ronde found sympathy in many areas for its plight. One area that was heavily contested was that of hunting and fishing. The restoration of the tribes was occurring in the midst of the Indian fishing rights conflicts of the Pacific Northwest. During the hearings about Grand Ronde Restoration, many fishing associations publicly spoke out against tribal restoration and lobbied the governor, fearful that the tribes would somehow take all of the fish. Termination had not terminated fishing rights to tribes and none of the Grand Ronde treaties guaranteed fishing rights. So the Grand Ronde leadership was forced to give up their hunting and fishing rights, for the first time, in order to be restored as a tribe. The approval of the tribe to allow the relinquishment of hunting and fishing was one of the final steps to gaining final approval.
Decolonization
Perhaps the most pressing matter that the Grand Ronde tribe needs to address remains its plans for decolonization. Victor Montejo has suggested that decolonization is a long time effort for any indigenous peoples (2002). There has been 500+ years of colonization in the Americas and it will take some time to unravel the colonial hold on tribal societies for everyone, if ever. The context for Oregon is a little different, only in the last 200 years has Oregon tribes had to deal with colonization matters. Therefore, tribes need to envision a long-term plan for their decolonization. Many of the continued negative discourse between tribes, within tribes, and between the tribes and the federal government are a series of stepping stones that all tribes must go through to continually negotiate their decolonization.
American Indian history for the past 200 years in Oregon has been unkind to the indigenous peoples. When examined in smaller pieces, the history appears disjointed, as if each individual era is disconnected from those before. When examined collectively we can see how there has been a steady progression of government programs, which have disempowered and disenfranchised American Indians from their land, culture and identity. The best example of one of these policies is the Dawes Indian Allotment Act, which led to the disenfranchisement of millions of acres of land from indigenous ownership. The Dawes Act not only removed surplus lands from indigenous control but set standards of Indian-ness by only allowing natives of one half or more Indian blood quantum to gain an allotment. This has resulted in the wide-scale acceptance of this definition of Indian-ness by tribes. From the Dawes Act to termination, the ultimate redefinition of Indian identity, there has been a loss of hundreds of thousands of tribal descendants from the tribes. The impact of this loss to the tribes has never been measured or studied in great detail.
The acceptance of “blood quantum” as a legal measure of tribal membership remains a phenomenon within tribes which some have labeled a “colonized” part of the contemporary tribal society. Some tribal elders are now advocating for efforts to re-integrate the lost generations with contemporary tribal society as a spiritual needs for the tribes to decolonize from the past two to five centuries of colonization. However, these efforts are blocked by the politics of casinos where for many tribes, current tribal members understand that if there are less tribal members that they stand to make a greater percentage of the casino profits than if the tribe were eliminate blood quantum standards and accept more liberal standards of tribal membership. The trend for many tribes is to make membership more restrictive. This is the trend for Grand Ronde where in the last attempt to change the tribal policies regarding membership, in 2007, members voted for a more restrictive policy, to restrict “tribal jumpers” by making them dis-enroll from another tribe for a term of five years, rather than the previous term of one year, before enrolling with the tribe. The other two proposed changes failed. They were meant to eliminate situations where children were not allowed to enroll if their parent was not on the roll at their birth. This policy has created split families, with some children allowed to enroll and others not.
The enrollment situation for Grand Ronde is not dissimilar from most tribes. The differences come from the fact that Grand Ronde and 109 other tribes were terminated, while many other tribes were not. The terminated tribes have a greater percentage of their members living outside of the tribal center and thus have a greater percentage of their membership marrying outside of the tribe. The next generations of children are diluted in their tribal blood quantum percentages. As this situation continues, every single tribal member has or will have family members who cannot enroll under present enrollment policies, mainly because of their blood quantum percentage. This is a degrading situation where in 100 years; Grand Ronde will have fewer members than today.[4]
Therefore, as we can see, the concept of “blood quantum” as a measure of Indian-ness has been inculcated into contemporary tribal society to the point of causing tribes to assist in their own degradation and colonization (Said 1979; Smith 1999).
Additionally, tribal nations are participating in the re-inculcation of non–tribal governmental and political systems in the United States. United States federal policies of tribal government recognition require a specific form of government structure, which closely matches that of the federal bureaucracy. This tiered top-down vertical federal system does not fit well with traditional tribal political systems which places leaders and other members on a level horizontal plane.
In tribes with a federal bureaucratic system of government, there are two political systems working simultaneously. While the bureaucratic system is the recognized government of the tribes, there is the additional tribal political system at work where many of the actual decisions are being made by elders groups that have no official standing in the tribal government. This creates an extremely complex political matrix that works well for some programs, and makes other programs completely ineffectual. Tribes need to find ways to return to the traditional horizontal governance of their people to successfully reintegrate their traditional cultural worldview. Such a worldview resonates closely with the cultural and environmental climate of their traditional homelands. Decolonization involves the necessity of examining the political matrix of the tribes and making decisions which eventually lead to a return of the people to a traditional cultural worldview. This does not mean a return to living in the manner of the past, as in eliminating the physical phenomenon of a contemporary lifestyle but instead adopting a horizontal relationship with the rest of the tribal community, the land, and with the surrounding American society. The path to this would involve a long-term commitment by the tribe to completely examine its society and structure and make gradual and intentional changes in the direction of a traditional cultural worldview.
The former terminated tribes need time to implement changes in their society. It took many years of acculturation and termination to create a present tribal structure. It will take many more years of work to rebuild the tribes to counteract the effects of colonization. It will take the efforts of the whole community to effectively make change and restore significant parts of the community. For many tribes, “the community’ is the issue, because with termination, the flight from the reservation caused the dissolution of a community consciousness. So for many, efforts need to be made to bring the community back together. These things are occurring for many communities and the results are showing in organizations like at Grand Ronde, in its Canoe family.
Inter-tribally, there is much to be done. As a result of termination, the tribes in Oregon now have overlapping territorial interests which have yet to be resolved. While the western Oregon tribes were terminated, the non-terminated eastern Oregon tribes took responsibilities and liberties in their oversight of western Oregon lands. During the termination era, this tribal oversight served to protect tribal sovereign rights to cultural resources and should be commended. Contemporarily some eastern Oregon tribes are claiming rights in western Oregon, rights that was not their right to claim before termination. In addition, the restored tribes of western Oregon have overlapping claims to treaties and lands that, in this age of casino development, are causing political conflicts that bleed into all areas of tribal interaction. Many of the claims are based on erroneous histories about the tribes or “urban legends” about what is the reality of a tribal historic presence.
For the restored tribes, those just now restoring their ability to research their history and culture, the issue of a historic presence has become part and parcel of the issues of casino development, ceded lands, and economic development. Grand Ronde is working diligently to restore its presence within its ceded lands; however, the tribe constantly must correct previous versions of tribal history in public lands, which privilege other tribes. In addition, in the age of restoration of tribal governance, there are newly recognized tribes, like the Coquille, Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw, and Cow Creek band of Umpquas, some of which claim treaties in common with the Grand Ronde and Siletz reservations. Therefore, there has developed a new category of political collaboration, shared treaty claims, and shared ceded lands. In the restoration era, the policies regarding claims to treaties by tribes have become blurred, while in the era before termination, there were more definite BIA policies and administration about which tribes could claim specific treaties. The situation is such that unless tribes come together to discuss the issues, there will be continuous conflicts over ceded land claims.
Like Victor Montejo, I believe that these conflicts are akin to negotiations (2002). They are inter and intra-tribal negotiation which must occur to understand and solve the problem of colonization and negotiate their place in the American political landscape. These negotiations will continue to occur for many years as tribes are restored, as people return to the reservations or form a renewed relationship with their ancestry, and as tribal relations with the American people, states, and federal government continues to change. Hopefully, these changes will be for the better, and progress will be made toward normalizing tribal peoples’ relationships within the American context.
Formerly terminated people from Grand Ronde must come to terms with the history of termination. There exists in the tribe a generational fear that the tribe will be terminated again. Much of the work by tribal government and by tribal leaders is towards a future when the tribe will no longer have to fear termination. For now however, tribal members remain fearful that unless they secure the tribe’s place in society, that one day termination will occur again. This fear causes the negation of many programs at the tribe in favor of development in support of the economics of the tribe. Regardless development needs to occur in other sectors of tribal society so that people may come to terms with termination, recognize the effects of the era and work to mend the remaining fractures in tribal society.
Conclusion
Embracing the history of the Grand Ronde tribe has been a challenge. Much of the efforts to research the history have occurred for the time previous to termination. We have come to understand well the culture of the tribe and what conditions were like at the reservation. There remain important events and situation that deserve illumination. Termination was the most significant unknown area of history relevant to the present generation. Unless this work occurred now, much of the knowledge that elders possessed may have gone missing from our understandings of the era. When I began this research I wanted to understand how and why termination occurred and what happened within the termination era, that period of time following termination. All tribal members have their own personal understanding of that era and this research could not hope to fully represent all perspectives. Perspectives, oral histories were gathered from people of very different experiences.
As a native anthropologist I strove in this research to embody many of the decolonizing points made by scholars in decolonizing anthropology. First the research occurred with the blessing of the Grand Ronde Tribe’s Culture Committee and the Tribal Council. Many other tribal elders and members also expressed an interest and appreciation in the subject and asked many of the same questions that I have asked. Therefore the subject is important to the tribe and while this research is not an answer to all questions, it does reveal much about what occurred during the termination of the Grand Ronde tribe.
The greatest challenge has been to negotiate the experience of being a native anthropologist, working within a native society, while learning and practicing anthropology (Deloria 1969; Medicine and Jacobs 2001; Smith 1999). It has taken much outside-of-the-box thinking to negotiate the two worlds of anthropology and tribal society and remain sane and comfortable with who I am as a scholar and tribal member. Some native scholars do not believe that native people have any business being anthropologists. Linda Smith noticed that some indigenous communities are harsher and more critical on their own people, than on white scholars (1999). This has been the case at times when working with tribes in Oregon.
However, there is a real-world value to tribal members being operative within fields of social sciences to help their tribal society. If this does not occur then tribe gives the power to define the tribe its people and culture to outside agencies who do not always have the best intentions of the tribe as their priority. Tribes need to be recognized as being the true experts on their own context, history and culture. This is part of the problem with the issues of termination. In termination the tribe was re-defined by the government and its agents as being non-Indian because of the assumption that they were assimilated. This redefinition had powerful consequences for the tribe’s legal and political status. Therefore the tribe needs to continue to gather tribal experts to defend itself and to set the tone for research and representation in society (Smith 1999). This is a decolonizing project which will help ensure the continued survival of the tribe within the American socio-political context.
It is my hope that other tribal members will choose to take the subject of termination further and reveal more about other phenomena. Research on the psychology of the tribe following termination would be an important contribution to understanding the tribe’s history. There is much work to be done collecting additional stories of the termination era as well. The stories revealed here are representative, but not exhaustive of the combined experiences of termination.
As part of that effort I advocate for tribal members to sit down and begin writing or narrating their own biographies and stories of their family. At the Grand Ronde tribe there are many projects that can occur empowering tribal members to do this work for themselves or with family. It is my contention that the Grand Ronde tribe can write its history through tribal member participation. In 1999 the tribal council hired Stephen Dow Beckham to write the tribe’s history. Since then there has been no word on the progress of that project. But there are enough interested and talented individuals at the tribe where we can do this work ourselves. Such an effort would make the history incredibly relevant to all tribal members and possibly serve to galvanize the tribe to take on more projects in this manner.
As I have shown, oral histories from tribal members of termination are more accurate than urban legends created by federal employees. Many elders maintained that the tribe had never agreed to termination. The origin of these stories began with their parents as many elders were children at termination. The oral histories turned out to be correct. It remains to be seen what other oral histories exist in the community that correctly represent the history of the tribe. Essentially, published and spoken accounts that stated that the tribe agreed to termination were politically manipulated stories. True history for the tribe lies in the oral histories from elders. This is a dimension of history-telling which has grown in anthropology over the past 20-30 years and has proven to change the discipline in powerful and positive ways for native people (Dauenhauer and Dauenhauer 1994; Deloria 1969; Kan 1999; Lewis and Kingston 2007; Miller 1999; Wasson 2001; Younker 2003). Elders are the informational and cultural archives of the tribe (Lewis and Kingston 2007).
These projects constitute decolonizing projects for the Grand Ronde tribe. To empower the people to do the work themselves takes the power from non-tribal members and places it securely in the hands of people who lived through their own history and have a responsibility towards that history. The effort of conducting and composing this research has served as a decolonizing effort for me as a scholar. As a result of this research I am informed enough about the tribe’s overall history to conduct presentations and teach classes about the subject. It remains my intention to influence other tribal members to take up such studies like this themselves. In the end the tribe will become stronger and more knowledgeable about itself in every generation. This project then embodies many of the points made by Maori scholar Linda Smith who has sought to empower indigenous researchers by advocating that tribal organizations take the power and rights to communicate their own context upon themselves, and away from the colonial governments (1999). History telling is the practicing of tribal sovereignty.
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[1] Originally Public Law 103-382 – Oct. 20, 1994 108 Stat.3773, Title IX – INDIAN, NATIVE HAWAIIaN,
AND ALASKA NATIVE EDUCATION, Now called Title VII.
[2] These tribes were formerly fourth sector tribes who did not have reservations. They are newly recognized tribal governments by the federal government and are eligible for reservations. They were all terminated under the Western Oregon Indian Termination Act as individual tribes. Some of the members of these tribes had family who lived on reservations.
[3] Incidentally, all of these politicians are Republicans.
[4] This is clearly the result of a net out-marriage of tribal member will continue to dilute Indian blood quantum. There are some families who work to marshal their blood, but this is not the direction of most. It does not make logical sense for people to continue to marry their cousins, this was strictly forbidden in traditional native society, and will likely result in genetic problems in future generations.