Re: Request for help

Elizabeth B. Pollard (uahebp01@asnuah.asn.net)
Wed, 14 Oct 1992 08:28:00 CST

Paula asks why anthropologists didn't contribute to the hearings
in Congress concerning termination of federal status and decontrol of
Native Americans in the 1950s. I recall discussions of this question
when I was a graduate student in anthropology in the 1960s. There were
two basic reasons: (1) anthropologists who had done research on the
tribes considered for termination were not invited to give testimony,
or (2) to do so would constitute a conflict of interest when that
research had been funded by federal agencies. It is my impression that
many cultural anthropologists in the United States in the 1950s were
much in favor of allowing tribes to decide *when* they were ready for
self-determination and opposed to cooperating with a Congress bent
on imposing termination on tribes not ready for it.

Please don't get the idea that termination of federal control
over the tribes affected was always imposed; some tribes (the Peoria,
Ottawa, and Wyandotte in Oklahoma and the Confederated Tribe of the
Colville Reservation in Washington state) even petitioned Congress for
it. See Arthur V. Watkins, "Termination of Federal Supervision: The
Removal of Restrictions Over Indian Property and Person," in "American
Indians and American Life," edited by George E. Simpson and J. Milton
Yinger, *The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science*, Volume 311, May, 1957, pp. 47-55, for a short history of
termination. If you want more information than is given there, see
the following:

Fixico, Donald L. *Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian
Policy, 1945-1960*. Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1986.

Stern, Theodore. *The Klamath Tribe: A People and Their Reservation*.
Univ. of Washington Press, 1966. (Stern is an anthropologist)

Paula raises an important question about how much the witch-hunt
instigated by Senator McCarthy had to do with the absence of social
scientists at the hearings. Probably a great deal. I knew two
professors of anthropology who had been "raked over the coals" by the
House Un-American Activities Committee, one for helping the Kiowa-Apache
revive an exclusive dance which had once (and does today) symbolize
their ethnic identity, and another who had proposed that BIA schools on
the Navajo Reservation give instruction in the Dineh language. Watkins,
in the article cited above, shows with quotes from the hearings that the
Eighty-third Congress had an ideology that favored the assimilation of
Native Americans into mainstream Euro-American society. Here were two
professors favoring the persistence of a tribal identity. They were made
to feel that the nation's lawmakers considered that "un-American." Both
were, understandably, bitter. But neither gave up.

Grosvenor Pollard
via Elizabeth B. Pollard

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Elizabeth Pollard Bitnet: uahebp01@uahvax1
Systems Librarian Internet: uahebp01@asnuah.asn.net
Univ. of Ala./Huntsville Compuserve: 72457,1560
Huntsville, AL 35899 Phone: (205) 895-6313
Fax: (205) 895-6862

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