Keywords
American Indian political thought, civil rights, self-determination, termination, ethnic relations
Abstract
Beginning in the early 1950s, the United States Congress enacted a program of “termination” of American Indian tribes. By eliminating the special relationship between tribes and the federal government, termination aimed at the full assimilation of American Indians into U.S. society. Government proponents advocated for termination using the language of equal rights, freedom, and integration. Previous scholarship has shown that anti-termination advocates, by contrast, appealed to the internationalist Cold War language of development, self-governance, and global decolonization to resist termination. These same leaders also invoked the civil rights language of termination’s proponents, however. Their arguments illustrated how the federal government misconstrued and misapplied the concepts of equality and freedom in relation to federal Indian policy; in other words, they used the colonizers’ own weapons against them. Not only is this analysis an important missing piece in historical scholarship on anti-termination advocacy, but it also challenges the supposed opposition between tribal sovereignty and civil rights struggles and emphasizes the historical coexistence of multiple competing interpretations of American freedom and equality.
Recommended Citation
Kravitz, Eliza (2024) "Using the Colonizers’ Own Weapons: The Politics of Equality, Freedom, & Integration in Advocacy Against American Indian Termination," Swarthmore Undergraduate History Journal: 5 (2), 105-126. https://works.swarthmore.edu/suhj/vol5/iss2/4
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