Indian termination policy

Indian termination was the policy of the United States from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It was shaped by a series of laws and policies with the intent of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American society. Assimilation was not new. The belief that indigenous people should abandon their traditional lives and become ""civilized"" had been the basis of policy for centuries. But what was new was the sense of urgency, that with or without consent, tribes must be terminated and begin to live ""as Americans"". To that end, Congress set about ending the special relationship between tribes and the federal government. The intention was to grant Native Americans all the rights and privileges of citizenship, reduce their dependence on a bureaucracy whose mismanagement had been documented, and eliminate the expense of providing services for native people.In practical terms, the policy ended the U.S. government's recognition of sovereignty of tribes, trusteeship over Indian reservations, and exclusion of state law applicability to native persons. From the government's perspective Native Americans were to become taxpaying citizens, subject to state and federal taxes as well as laws, from which they had previously been exempt.From the native standpoint, Northern Cheyenne former U.S. Senator from Colorado Ben Nighthorse Campbell said of assimilation and termination in a speech delivered in Montana:These cross-purposes, termination and preservation of native identity, collided after World War II, survived through the anti-collectivism era of Joseph McCarthy, finally unraveled in The Sixties and ultimately led to the decades of Native American self-determination.