Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Pendulum Swings Wildly

Episode Date: July 3, 2023

On today’s episode of Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, we are going to explore an explosive pendulum swing in the mindset of the American people, when the government basically told Native communities: “No more interventions. You’re on your own!” The ominous-sounding Termination Policy fundamentally changed the relationship between the Federal Government and Native Tribes, again, and its reverberations can be felt even today. Note: We would like to issue a content warning for this episode. Some parts of this episode may not be suitable for younger audiences. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and KariMarisa Anton Thank you to our guest K. Tsiannina Lomawaima and some of the music in this episode was composed by indigenous composer R. Carlos Nakai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Interior Chinatown is an all-new series based on the best-selling novel by Charles Yu about a struggling Asian actor who gets a bigger part than he expected when he witnesses a crime in Chinatown. Streaming November 19th, only on Disney+. Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to episode seven in our series, Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America. We began this series with the government's intervention into the lives of Native Americans, from stolen ancestral lands to General Pratt's experiment on prisoners of war and the forced assimilation of Native American children who were taken far from their homes. Today, we're going to explore an explosive pendulum swing in the

other direction, when the government basically told Native communities, enough, you're on your own. The ominous-sounding termination policy fundamentally changed the relationship between the federal government and Native tribes again, and its reverberations can be felt even today. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. In the early 1950s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs set out to recruit families to leave their reservations and assimilate into urban American life. Promising high-paying jobs, good educational opportunities, and a happy life, they offered one-way fare and a $160

payment for the first month's expenses. If they had children, they could get an extra $10 per child up to eight children. They assured the families that before the month's end, fathers would have found employment. Clyde and Charlotte Day, along with six of their 17 children, took the government's deal and ventured off to Cleveland, where instead of finding good employment opportunities, the Days experienced discrimination, low-paying jobs, and poverty. Clyde had been a hunter-trapper before the move, but in Cleveland, he could only find work as a dishwasher, and his small salary couldn't support his family. Overwhelmed by the hustle and bustle and all the differences from their previous life in a cabin near a lake, the family huddled in a small one-bedroom apartment, afraid to go outside.

huddled in a small one-bedroom apartment, afraid to go outside. When the first month was up, the Days asked to return home, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the BIA, refused to help. While the Days were spared the fate of being forced out of their apartment to live in public parks like some other Native families who struggled to survive, they had to wait until Clyde could slowly earn the money for the passage back home where the land could feed them. By the mid-1960s, the days relocated again, this time with the help of a social worker and not the BIA. Clyde suffered from alcoholism and couldn't bear the thought of moving to a city again. His family split apart. One daughter left to live with an older sibling, and Charlotte got work as a housekeeper for a wealthy family. She was savvy, though, and managed to pass a civil

servant's exam, which landed her a job as a cook at the YMCA. The Day family, along with countless other indigenous people, struggled for years because the government had decided it was time for Native families to assimilate fully into American culture. Back in 1934, the Johnson-O'Malley Act was passed, and it's a law that is still in effect today. The legislation was written by two senators, W. Hiram Johnson and Thomas P. O'Malley, and part of its purpose was to regulate the education of Native American children ages 3 through grade 12, who possessed at least one quarter of the blood of a federally recognized tribe. The Johnson O'Malley Act also provided money for social services, health care, and

educational needs to states with significant Native American populations. The ultimate goal of the Johnson O'Malley Act was to separate the federal government from the daily happenings on reservations. It shifted the responsibility to states to manage these things. It sent states federal funding to support services needed for Native Americans, things like kindergarten curriculum or farming assistance. The Johnson O'Malley Act marked a new stage in U.S. relations with Indigenous people. The government had started to loosen their vice grip on forced assimilation. It was a practical decision. It was the 1930s. The nation as a whole

was suffering under the weight of the Great Depression. It didn't make sense, economic or otherwise, to continue to press for assimilation, not when there weren't even enough resources and jobs to go around for white European Americans. Still, there were some who championed using cultural sensitivity when creating policy around the country's relationship with Native Americans. If you remember, after the Merriam Report was published, President Roosevelt appointed John Collier as the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Collier helped create an Indian New Deal to accompany Roosevelt's own New Deal. The biggest piece of legislation in the Indian New Deal was the Indian Reorganization Act, which we've talked about before, and it decreased some of the federal government's control on Native

American tribes and increased their autonomy over their lands and tribal governments. As Commissioner Collier had little interest in Americanizing Native communities, instead, he worked to preserve Indigenous peoples' ancestry in a number of ways, like hiring photographers and anthropologists to document Native ways of life and languages and decriminalizing Natives' religious ceremonies, which had been outlawed in 1883. He organized efforts to return their land. In his 12 years as commissioner, Collier also worked on education issues, focusing on training teachers and creating adult and bilingual

education for Native Americans. He also managed to shut down 16 boarding schools and open and fund 84 day schools on reservation lands. These day schools kept children at home with their families. But it was an uphill battle because even with the new policies of the Johnson O'Malley Act and the Indian Reorganization Act, by the end of World War II, the government was walking back its support and the nation's mindset was moving closer to termination. Termination was a policy that essentially said, our policies regarding tribes have gone far enough. It's time for them to disband, leave their reservations, integrate into the rest of America. One aspect of the termination policy was relocation, which gave Native Americans one-way tickets into urban areas. Some people in government felt that government involvement in things like boarding schools and even much of the work done by the BIA held Indians back from joining American society.

It was a decidedly pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-and-join-the- join the rest of Americans kind of mentality. Americans, home from World War II and settling into the culture of 1950s America, increasingly felt that the federal government should be less involved in Native American affairs and that they should sink or swim on their own. One man who was influential in setting and implementing these termination policies was Arthur Vivian Watkins, a senator from Utah who served on a committee whose job it was to oversee issues related to Native American tribes. He later went on to work on the Indian Claims Commission, which we'll talk about more in a future episode. Arthur Watkins likened the policy of termination to the Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln signed during the Civil War. He was

adamant that government assistance made Native Americans entitled and lazy. He said, they want all the benefits of the things we have, highways, schools, hospitals, everything that civilization furnished, but they don't want to help pay their share of it. This focus on money is crucial to understanding what was happening with the termination mindset. Back in the 1800s, before the Trail of Tears, when the U.S. government began making treaties with native tribes, promising that in exchange for their land and relocation, tribes would be paid. Literally, treaties said things like the, quote, great white father, meaning the U.S. government, would provide for tribes as long as water flows or grass grows upon the earth. Those are direct quotes. And even though the government broke treaty promises all over the place, the Supreme Court did intervene a number of times to uphold the trust responsibility as a legal obligation that

the country was required to meet. Basically, yeah, the Supreme Court said, you gotta make good on your financial obligations, US government. You sign the treaties. It's up to you. But a hundred years later, the nation was tired of paying for roads or schools or repaying tribes who had, despite the obstacles the government had thrown at them, learned to thrive on their new lands. For decades, Native American boarding schools relied on students' manual labor as a means of keeping them afloat and open under the guise that the work would prepare them for self-sufficiency in adulthood. So it was time, legislators urged, to put that training to the test. A House Select Committee on Indian Affairs had this to say, the goal of Indian education should be to make the Indian child a better American, rather than to equip him to simply be a better Indian.

By 1948, Congress was advocating for the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to create criteria to be used for termination and the withdrawal of federal funding. The dominoes fell from there. By 1950, termination was well underway and many of the federally funded Native American schools in states like Idaho, Michigan, Washington, and Wisconsin had begun to close. The 1950s were a time when white Americans leaned into the American dream and the idea of the nuclear family unit. To the general population, to be American meant finding success as an individual. But the communal lives of tribe members did not fit into the parameters of the American dream. A spouse, 2.5 children, a dog, a home, a car. Tribal life was often the exact opposite of what was being cultivated as the American identity. It was time the federal government advocated for tribes to be

terminated or disbanded. And one of the first tribes to face this policy were the Menominee in Wisconsin. The Menominee tribe had a very profitable lumber mill, which factored into their rise to the top of the government's list of tribes that were deemed ready to survive on their own without the benefit of government support. At the time, the federal government owed the tribe $8.5 million after they had mismanaged the Menominee's timber resources. When split into equal shares, that amounted to $1,500 per tribal member, which is like $15,000 in modern money. like $15,000 in modern money. The Menominee weren't particularly interested in giving up their federal protections and tribal land. But Arthur Vivian Watkins stepped in with a threat. If you don't comply with our new policy of termination, if you don't give up your land,

you won't get the money we owe you. Congress passed the Menominee Termination Act in 1954. It stripped them of their trustee relationship with the government. After their termination, all of the Menominee tribal property was transferred to a new corporation called Menominee Enterprises, and the reservation was listed as a new Wisconsin county, Menominee County. and the reservation was listed as a new Wisconsin county, Menominee County. After termination, it became the least populated and poorest county in Wisconsin. 75% of high school students did not graduate. The county wasn't able to fund the taxes it needed to support its health care clinics or its schools. Select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining.

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or like me, a $1 small coffee and a $2 small latte. Available now until November 24th in Ontario only. The federal government didn't want to just stop paying for boarding schools or day schools on reservations. They wanted Native students to attend public schools with their white counterparts. Watkins and others crafted a series of bills that culminated in House Resolution 108, the Act to Free Indians from Federal Supervision, which set out to do just that and more. It was the federal government's formal statement on termination, and it was published in the summer of 1953. Here's what it says. Whereas it is the policy of Congress as rapidly as possible to make the Indians within the territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws

and entitled to the same privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all the rights and prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship. All offices of the BIA, whose primary purpose was to serve any Indian tribe or individual Indian freed from federal supervision, should be abolished. No longer were Native tribes wards of the federal government, and they no longer had the scaffolding of the Bureau of Indian Affairs or any other governmental assistance to support them. Terminated tribes were on their own. This term, termination, was to many Native Americans as

ominous as it sounds. In the 11 years from 1953 to 1964, termination took 1.3 million acres that previously had protected status as land held in trust for indigenous use. 13,000 Native Americans lost their tribal affiliation, and over 100 tribes were terminated, or no longer recognized as a Native group by the federal government. So how did people react to this? A newspaper report used this language, Indians swarming into the Senate caucus confirmed opposition to termination policies. While some Native tribes agreed to termination, not all did, and many were not even consulted. Among the concerns of the Native Americans were tribal members who, because of their age, infirmity, or inability to understand English, might agree and then wind up destitute and separated from their community. University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologists visited members

of the Menominee tribe after they had agreed to termination, but before it went into effect. They reported overwhelming anxiety among those that they interviewed. One wished for death for their family. They said, I hope I'm dead before termination comes. I have thought of giving my daughters and granddaughters sleeping pills. Another confessed to sleepless nights and ongoing uncertainty about the future. A third linked termination to a story passed down through the generations about a boulder on their land. The prophecy was that when spirit rock crumbles into dust, the Menominee people will meet the same fate. The tribal member said, What the old people said about spirit rock is proving true. This is the end.

The white man won't be satisfied until he makes beggars out of all of us. One Arizona newspaper declared in 1954 that termination was good and necessary to elevate Native Americans from their current Second Quest citizenship. The title of the article, The Advancing Indian, encapsulates fully the idea that the tough love approach, that only nudging Native Americans to leave the nest of reliance upon the government will allow them to make progress. Many Native Americans didn't care for this concept of progress. They just wanted to live in their communities on their own lands. One Sioux man put it plainly, termination is wrong. The policy of termination set out to disband tribes and also to relocate Native Americans to established urban areas throughout the country,

often far away from their reservations. The government tried to make it sound appealing, like, come live in our cities where there are better jobs and quality housing. In fact, they published pamphlets that were distributed. They showed things like a group of mothers pushing strollers standing in front of a city bus. But many tribes saw it as just another way to dispossess them of their land. If tribes disbanded and scattered to integrate into the mainstream culture, then there would be no need for reservations, and the land could be sold to non-natives. In the 1950s, this was no longer scrappy settlers looking to build a homestead by hand. It was corporations looking to build full neighborhoods or shopping centers or corporate

parks. Between 1940 and 1960, over 122,000 Indians moved to cities in search of economic opportunity. Over 31,000 of these received financial assistance for transportation and help in finding housing and employment under the Voluntary Relocation Program, conducted by the BIA. But around 50% of the Native Americans who relocated went home after five years due to a lack of jobs, education, and social services. Ray Marie Martinez's family moved from the Colville Reservation in Washington State to Los Angeles in 1957. Perhaps they were lured by one of the many posters that appeared around the country, usually showing photographs of indigenous people working, sitting with family, or studying. The posters said something like,

Come to Denver, the chance of your lifetime. Ray was only eight years old when her family relocated, and she had two long braids that her mother cut off when they arrived in Los Angeles, hoping that they would help her little girl fit in. Ray was still teased pretty relentlessly. Ray's parents were given $320 for one month plus temporary housing and job counseling. That's roughly the equivalent of $3,500 today. The Martinez's had six children to feed and only that one month to launch their money-making careers in this new place. The kinds of jobs that indigenous people generally found earned low wages and offered little room for growth. They did all sorts of factory jobs or cleaning or loading and unloading jobs at warehouses. Typically,

the jobs were behind the scenes types of roles. The Martinez family moved to the projects or low income housing and managed to stay in the city. But little Ray was homesick for the big trees and apple orchards on their reservation. In a 2012 interview, Ray said that being away from everything that was familiar to me still makes me emotional. A number of Native people from all over the country ended up in Los Angeles, though relocation also sent people to Chicago, Denver, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Dallas, among other cities. There were about 12,000 indigenous people in Los Angeles County during the first years of termination and relocation. That number doubled by the 1970s. And today, Los Angeles County is home to the highest number of Native American residents of any county in the United States,

with over 140,000 indigenous people living there. Ray Marie Martinez did not enjoy growing up in the city and eventually struggled with alcohol dependency and an abusive relationship. Today, she works for United American Indian Involvement, an organization that deals with what its leaders call the legacy of the relocation program, from assisting needy families to providing a number of mental and physical health services. Ray's alcohol dependence is not unusual, and researchers who've been able to interview indigenous people who were relocated in the 20th century are finding clear ties between relocation, substance abuse, and poverty.

What it comes down to is that the stress of events like relocation impacted Indigenous peoples' well-being significantly. One research study notes that this move from tight-knit, small intergenerational communities to the anonymity of urban life was one of the latest large-scale government assaults on cultural values of sharing and strong intergenerational family obligations. In other words, the relocations caused stress and psychological harm, disruptions in identity formation, and even greater distrust of government than Indigenous people might have already had. Researchers found that a cross-generation continuity is so central to understanding the long-term effects of historical cultural losses that the effects

have been referred to as intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder. If you move to a large unfamiliar city and can't find a job that will support your family and don't have any familiar people around to help you, and on top of that you've lost your sense of community and identity and are no longer able to speak your language or dress in a way that's comfortable for you or practice your religion openly, you may start drinking to numb the pain and feeling of failure that could develop. It may surprise you to know that in the 1950s, information about preparing for relocation was also provided to white people. Mimeographed pamphlets were distributed by the Bureau of Indian

Affairs containing a very positive spin on the whole process and claiming that Native Americans were eager to get to the big cities for more opportunities. These pamphlets said things like, fairness and justice require that we help American Indians improve their standard of living through their own individual efforts. Little sketches of stick figures in loincloths wearing feathers and standing next to water attempt to illustrate the sentiment that American Indians want to get into the stream of American life and swim. They don't want to sink in the idleness of sub-marginal reservation lands. Never mind the fact that indigenous life was already American life and that it was white people forcing them onto the sub-marginal reservation lands in the first place.

The next pages of the pamphlet dig into stereotypes, noting, those of us who have little or no firsthand experience with American Indians usually think of them as a group whom the march of progress had passed by, a people living on reservations established for them many years ago by Uncle Sam, hunting, fishing, and trapping, gathering from time to time for Indian dancing or ceremonials, a colorful people living in a colorful past. The wistfulness depicted tries to absolve the government of all responsibility in a too bad all these bad things happened a long time ago, but here's what we're doing now to help out kind of way. But many Native Americans didn't make out so well. Racism was

alive and well. Businesses were unwilling to hire them and neighborhoods didn't want to welcome indigenous arrivals onto their block. The low-paying jobs they could secure often weren't enough to support their families. And then of course, the government paid for them to travel away from the reservations, but not to return, which left some to fall into a cycle of poverty, homelessness, or addiction. According to Stephen Alpivar, author of The Rights of Indians and Tribes, nothing else that Congress can do causes tribal members to lose more of their rights than termination. Termination, he says, is the ultimate weapon of Congress and the ultimate fear of tribes. Despite its drastic effect, the Supreme Court has held that Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause to terminate a tribe.

Most of the remaining boarding schools were closed and students were sent to public schools or day schools. Children without families were put into the foster care system. Some were sent out to fend for themselves. One student remembered that when she was told she was no longer a ward of the court and was free to leave school, she thought, free to go where? Free to do what? I graduate from high school, but I didn't know what I was going to do with my life. I knew how to do laundry, but you couldn't really get jobs. A bit over eight decades after General Pratt began his assimilation experiment on prisoners of war,

the national imperative to assimilate Native children into the mainstream white culture through forced removal from their homes continued. It wasn't boarding schools this go-round. It was placing children with white families to indoctrinate them into a new American identity. While couched in terms of assimilation and purporting to be for the good of the child, the country's relocation ideology and practice allowed for between 25 and 35 percent of Native American children to be removed from their families of origin. And of those, 90 percent were placed with non-Native families, mostly in foster care, but also as adoptees. Some were institutionalized.

Usually the rationale given for removal was that the families were unfit, and yet that charge was not applied equally across the board for specific designations of unfitness. For example, native children were removed when alcohol was present in the home, but that standard was often not applied to non-Native families. In 1958, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, along with the Child Welfare League of America, created the Indian Adoption Project, or IAP. Adoption Project, or IAP. This was a continuation of the policy of removal in which Native children were adopted out to non-Native families, primarily white families, which had the added effect of reducing the numbers of reservation residents, cutting funding to boarding schools, and to, quote, satisfy a large demand for Indian children on the part of Anglo parents. The IAP lasted a decade and was responsible for removing nearly 400 Native children. Many of these kids were moved from one side of the country to the other to live with white families,

thus making a return to their families of origin even more challenging, if not impossible. Thousands of children were ripped away from their families of origin. Single moms were pressured to relinquish newborns in order to keep their older children. Some mothers were told they had a still birth when really the newborn was sent straight for adoption into a white family. It was such a widespread phenomenon that the IAP-instituted, decade-long program of removal was called the Sixties Scoop. From 1958 to 1978, over 13,000 Native children would be adopted. Even more remained in foster care, where their foster parents received a stipend for taking them in. Meanwhile, survivors of this mass removal

reported feeling lost, like they never belonged, and some resorted to extreme measures to deal with their feelings of otherness. One adoptee explained that he used to rub toothpaste on his arms and face in an attempt to fit in with his white family and community. Others reported that their families used bleach to lighten their complexions. In addition to assimilation, there was, of course, a financial component to the mass removal of Native children. It was easier and cheaper to remove children than to invest in the infrastructure of Native communities. Why tackle poverty, expand electricity access, and provide options for child care and schooling when there were scores of white families eager to take in a Native child? Even though termination policies meant the end for most boarding schools,

some continued their operations along with their efforts to Americanize Native children. Survivor accounts of their experiences sound eerily similar to that of their family members who had been forced to attend in previous generations. June Marie Wanaka entered a boarding school in the 1950s at age six. She says, I fought to live each day or do whatever I went through to be able to make it through. And I have scars in my heart and in my mind. I look at my grandkids now and how small they are. And I thought that's how small I was when I was treated like that. And I thought, boy, I'm so glad I made it through those things. And so I found peace talking about what happened to me.

Donald Nakoni of the Kiowa tribe and a former Marine attended the Riverside Indian School in Oklahoma and said he will never, ever forgive this school for what they did to me. I still feel that pain. It may be good now, but it wasn't back then. Donald spoke of being beaten when he cried and having a lie forced into his mouth when he spoke in his native Kiowa language. In the 1950s, termination set back progress by stripping children of the resources they needed to receive the education they deserved. Boarding schools limped along,

dragging students with them. A decade later, it was an assassination that swung the pendulum again. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you soon. Thank you to composer R. Carlos Nakai, a Native American musician who provided some of the music you heard in today's episode. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And this episode is

written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you enjoyed this episode, we would love to have you leave us a rating or review or to share on social media. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon.