Lake Roosevelt Administrative History

Termination and Relocation

While Reclamation and the Park Service worried about budgets for the newly formed Coulee Dam Recreational Area, Indian tribes had much larger issues confronting them. Faced with their very survival as federally recognized tribes, the Colville and Spokane tribal governments did not have much time during the 1950s and 1960s for issues at the adjoining recreation area. Federal Indian policy changed following World War II and bureaucrats were joined by many Indians, particularly returning war veterans, in favoring full integration of native people into mainstream American society. This led to federal policies of termination (ending federal trust status) and relocation throughout the United States, as well as the work of the Indian Claims Commission.

The push for termination began during President Harry Truman's term and accelerated following the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952. It started with the Zimmerman Plan in 1947 that ranked tribes according to their perceived ability to survive withdrawal of federal trust status. Truman's 1950 appointment of Dillon S. Myer to be Commissioner for the Bureau of Indian Affairs ( BIA, formerly Office of Indian Affairs) put pressure on both the tribes and the agency. Myer proposed training and job placement assistance for those who wanted to leave the reservation, and he offered help in developing industrial programs for those who chose to remain. Both programs shared the same goal, that of making Indians independent of the federal government. Although Myer urged BIA officials to help tribes understand the effects of termination, he insisted on proceeding even without tribal cooperation. Myer also reorganized the BIA, and there was talk of eventually terminating the agency along with the tribes. In 1953, the Republican Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 with little discussion. Supported by the Department of the Interior, the bill established the policy of termination, ending the tribes' status as wards of the government and moving to withdraw all federal responsibilities to Indian tribes. Bills targeting specific tribes followed. [37]

Under termination, tribes were given two options to dispose of their tribally owned lands: either they could form a corporation to manage the properties under a trustee of their choice, or they could liquidate their assets and distribute the proceeds among tribal members. Should a tribe choose neither option, the Secretary of the Interior was authorized to transfer titles to a trustee who would then liquidate the holdings. Once targeted for termination, tribes had two to five years to complete the process. The push to terminate tribes weakened by the late 1950s, especially as states and local governments began to realize that the costs of taking over social services on former reservation lands far exceeded any benefits from taxing these lands. Before the effort ended, only 3 percent of all federally-recognized Indians were terminated. [38]

As a corollary to termination, the federal government pushed a policy of relocation to encourage Indians to move from reservations to urban areas where there were more job opportunities and the potential for a higher standard of living. The BIA believed that once tribal members adjusted to their new lives in the cities, there would be no need for reservations. Some Indians volunteered to move and in the decade following World War II, approximately 100,000 left reservations throughout the country. The change proved disastrous for many, however, who suffered profound culture shock and lacked basic urban skills such as knowing how to use a telephone. By the late 1950s, the BIA changed the focus from relocation to employment assistance, attracting interest from Indians wanting vocational training. Indian centers opened in cities to help relocated Indians. Ultimately, the failure of both termination and relocation helped fuel the Red Power movement of the 1960s. [40]

In 1954, a congressional report rated both the Spokane and the Colville Indians as able to handle their own affairs and thus ready for termination. The STI, however, moved quickly to squelch this idea. In a strong statement made to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1955, the tribe said that it was neglected by the federal government. When the Agency had moved from the Spokane to the Colville Reservation nearly thirty years earlier, the tribe had lost many services to which they were entitled. During these years, the STI had only a sub-agency and consequently the tribe had received essentially only what was left after the Colville Agency took first choice. The STI blamed the BIA for this and went on to suggest that the federal government improve services to tribal members instead of withdrawing support. The STI refused to consider termination until their long-standing land claim was settled by the Indian Claims Commission. The tribe later asked to be separated administratively from the CCT in 1966, due to "widely divergent" ideologies. [41]

The CCT was not able to escape the termination effort without a difficult fight that caused great dissension within the tribes. The BIA informed the Colville Business Council in February 1953 that it would assign technical staff to help them work on termination, which the Council had already been studying. The process began in earnest, however, with the passage of Public Law 772 on July 24, 1956. This law returned to tribal ownership over 800,000 acres of former tribal lands that had not been disposed of under the Homestead Act. A condition of this land return was that the Colville Business Council had to propose legislation to terminate federal supervision within five years. Ironically, had the CCT voted in favor of the Indian Reorganization Act twenty years earlier, the Secretary of the Interior could have returned these lands to the tribe without any termination provision, but he was not allowed to do this for a non-IRA tribe. A group within the CCT that favored termination drafted legislation that was introduced in Congress in 1962, but the bill died in committee. Similar legislation was introduced but not passed in each Congress through 1970. The Park Service fully expected termination to pass and planned to assume responsibility for fire protection for lands on the west side of the lake. The movement for Colville termination came as the country was shifting away from this program and tribes across the nation fought against these CCT bills. On the Colville Reservation, however, there were many who supported the move, and some of these supporters were elected to the Colville Business Council. Although termination plans were eventually dropped, hard feelings persisted among pro- and anti-termination factions on the reservation. [42]

Indian Claims Commission

The work of the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) provided a partial counterbalance to the post-war federal programs of termination and relocation. The 1946 legislation that established the ICC set a five-year period during which tribes could file claims, followed by another five years during which the three-person commission would reach decisions. The Commission heard 852 cases in the first 5 years. To accommodate the large number of claims, Congress allowed extensions until it finally dissolved the ICC in 1978. The STI, through the law firm of Wilkinson, Boyden & Cragun (later Wilkinson, Cragun & Barker), filed a claim in August 1951, asking for additional compensation for lands taken in 1887. The tribe asserted that the amount paid, totaling thirty-two cents per acre for 3.14 million acres, was too low and the ICC agreed, awarding the tribe an additional $6.7 million in 1967. In addition, the Spokane Tribal Council asked the Secretary of the Interior in 1949 for compensation for the flooding of nearly 3,000 acres of land following completion of Grand Coulee Dam. They waited too long to file this claim with the ICC, however. At the time of the large CCT settlement in the 1990s, the STI asked the House of Representatives to waive the statute of limitations and allow similar compensation to the tribe for its fishery loss and share of power revenue, noting that to compensate the CCT but not the STI "would be an egregious miscarriage of justice." This case is still pending. [43]

The CCT also filed a number of claims with the ICC. Various tribes of the CCT claimed millions of acres had been taken unfairly. After the Secretary of the Interior initially opposed these claims, the CCT finally agreed in 1956 to a settlement of $1 million for a total of 1.7 million acres. Tribal members received a payment of $350 per capita in 1961. The tribes filed another claim in 1973 that dealt primarily with the loss of their fishery due to Grand Coulee and Chief Joseph dams; this claim was settled for $3.257 million in 1978. An even more important case concerned the CCT claim to power revenue from Grand Coulee based on their claim to Columbia River waters. The tribes began negotiating with the government in the mid-1970s, but a special task force found the tribal legal claims without merit in 1980. The tribes sued and eventually won a settlement in 1994 in the Court of Appeals that included a lump sum of $53 million and annual payments of at least $15.25 million. [44]