The Federally Recognized Indian Tribe List Act of 1994 highlights the issue of administrative termination. This law demonstrates lawmakers’ concerns about past tribal terminations not authorized by Congress and forbids similar actions in the future. However, the rhetoric surrounding the bill disingenuously suggests that terminating tribes only interested Congress in the 1950s and does little to aid communities negatively impacted by these illegal actions. The scholarship on termination simply ignores these terminations and focuses exclusively on the Congressional process that emerged after World War II. This paper explores how and why both legislators and scholars have oversimplified their narratives about termination policy and how this oversimplification has impacted indigenous communities. Complicating our understanding of termination by considering administrative terminations extends our analysis back to the nineteenth century and into the twenty-first century, reveals the role played by officials in the executive branch in shaping policy as they implemented it, and corrects the idea that Congress only pursued the goal of tribal termination after World War II. If scholars develop a fuller historical understanding of termination policy, legislators concerned with the negative impact of these actions can potentially reshape policies that impact illegally terminated tribes seeking federal restoration.
About the presenterJay Precht
I am an associate professor of history at Penn State Fayette. My current research focuses on the administrative termination of indigenous communities. My publications include “The Nine from the Pines” in Native South (2013), “Pine-needle Basketry and Identity Politics” in Ethnohistory (2015), “Asserting Tribal Sovereignty through Compact Negotiations” in the American Indian Quarterly (2017), and “Coushatta Homesteading and the Development of the Community at Bayou Blue” in Journal of Southern History (2018).