Review: Termination to Restoration

American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953-2006 #

By Roberta Ulrich

University of Nebraska Press, 2010

Ulrich, Roberta. American Indian Nations from Termination to Restoration, 1953–2006. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. ISBN 9781496245373.

Termination is a policy everyone in Indigenous Studies can name and few can describe in detail. Between 1953 and the mid-1960s Congress voted to end the federal relationship with more than a hundred tribes, bands, and rancherias, affecting close to thirteen thousand people from Oregon to South Carolina and from Wisconsin to Texas. Most scholarship handles this catastrophe one nation at a time. Roberta Ulrich holds all of it in a single frame, then follows the survivors through four decades of campaigning to get the relationship back. In this review, I will argue that Ulrich has written the reference account of termination and restoration, the book that supplies the who, when, and how; I will also argue that she has not written the interpretive history the topic still needs, and that the two claims are not in tension.

Her own argument is plain, and she does not bury it. Termination was a coherent federal ideology carried out with almost no attention to local conditions. It failed by every measure its architects claimed to care about, and the nations that recovered did so through slow, unglamorous legislative work rather than any change of federal heart. Restoration came tribe by tribe, and it was never complete.

Two parts, many nations #

The book divides cleanly. "Breaking the Ties" moves through the terminations: Menominee, Klamath, the western Oregon tribes, Alabama-Coushatta and Catawba, the Utah Paiute bands, the California rancherias, the Oklahoma tribes and the Poncas. "The Way Back" reverses the sequence and traces the restoration campaigns, beginning with the Menominee act of 1973 (the template every later campaign studied), then Siletz, Cow Creek, Grand Ronde, Coos, Coquille, Klamath, and the rest. An epilogue weighs what restoration actually returned.

That structure is the argument. Setting Klamath beside Catawba beside a forty-acre rancheria makes visible something single-tribe monographs cannot show. Congress terminated communities with substantial timber assets and communities with essentially nothing, using the same statutory logic and the same rhetoric about "freeing" Indians from federal supervision; whatever the Bureau of Indian Affairs said about readiness, readiness was not the criterion. Ulrich lets the repetition across chapters do this work, and the repetition lands harder than an assertion would.

The second half constitutes the more original contribution. Restoration history lies scattered across tribal publications, legal literature, and a handful of case studies; Ulrich assembles it. She shows how the same handful of arguments got rebuilt for each new bill, how Oregon's congressional delegation became an unlikely engine of federal recognition, and how tribes traded away treaty rights, gaming options, or land claims to buy the votes for a restoration act. That last point is the book's sharpest observation, and it carries a deflationary sting: restoration returned status, rarely property, and often at a price written into the statute itself. The "restored" relationship was never simply the old one given back.

Reporting as method #

Ulrich spent her career at United Press International and at the Oregonian, where she opened the paper's first beat covering Native affairs, and her earlier book on the Columbia River fishing sites drew on that work. The method here is journalistic in the good sense. She read BIA files and congressional hearings, worked through the Hoover Commission and Meriam reports, used Alvin M. Josephy Jr.'s papers, and then went and talked to people. Interviews with Ada Deer, Sue Shaffer, Kathryn Harrison, and Dee Pigsley put tribal leaders at the center of the restoration story rather than in the margins of a federal one.

The interviews are the best thing in the book. They record how the loss registered in households, not just in appropriations tables, and they preserve the memory of organizers whose names do not appear in the Congressional Record. For anyone who wants to know what a restoration campaign actually required in labor and money and travel, this is the place to look.

The costs of the survey #

The breadth exacts a price. Ulrich narrates and rarely argues. Termination has a serious historiography, running from Donald Fixico's Termination and Relocation through Kenneth Philp's work on the policy's intellectual origins to Charles Wilkinson's Blood Struggle, and Ulrich engages it only lightly. She stakes out no position on the questions that literature fights over: 1) how far termination continued allotment-era logic, 2) how much of it was Cold War liberalism versus western resource politics, and 3) whether the Indian Claims Commission functioned as an instrument of termination.

The tribe-by-tribe organization also flattens. Each chapter follows a similar arc, which reinforces the comparative point but leaves the deeper cases underdeveloped. Readers who want termination's texture in one place should still go to Nicholas Peroff on the Menominee, Warren Metcalf on the Utah Paiutes, or David Beck on the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw. Laurie Arnold made the same recommendation in her review, and it stands.

A methodological gap remains as well. Here is a book about Indigenous nations that uses no Indigenous methodological framework. Ulrich treats oral testimony as reportage rather than as knowledge with its own protocols, and her analytic categories belong to policy history. For a journalist this choice is legitimate, but it leaves the book outside the decolonizing conversation that has reshaped the field since the 1990s.

Verdict #

Recommended, with a clear sense of what it is. Ulrich has written the reference account of termination and restoration, the one that tells you which nations, which statutes, which years, and who did the work of undoing it; she has not written the interpretive history that the topic still needs. Assign it to undergraduates, hand it to tribal community members researching their own recognition history, and keep it near the desk when you need to check a date. Then read the monographs for the argument.