III. Native Americans and the Struggle for Survival in the Self-Determination Era

For Native Americans, the civil rights era was never only about inclusion. It was also about survival. Native people faced racial discrimination as individuals, but Native nations faced something more: the continuing power of the United States over their land, governments, children, religions, and cultures.

That distinction matters. Black Americans fought a legal system built to deny them citizenship, voting power, equal schooling, housing, employment, and public dignity. Anti-Black racism remained the central organizing feature of American racial hierarchy. Native people also lived inside that hierarchy, but the law placed them in a different position. The United States had recognized Native peoples as nations, made treaties with them, taken their land, broken its promises, and then tried to absorb them into the general population. Native people were racialized, but they were also colonized.

For many groups in the civil rights era, the demand was access: access to the ballot, public schools, jobs, housing, universities, and public life. Native people had those claims too. But Native nations had another claim: the right to continue existing as peoples. Their struggle was not only for equal treatment. It was for land, sovereignty, children, culture, religion, and the power to govern their own communities.

By 1965, many Native communities were still living with the damage of termination and relocation. Termination was one of the most destructive federal Indian policies of the twentieth century. It aimed to end the special legal relationship between the federal government and certain tribes. Federal officials often described termination as freedom, equality, or release from federal supervision. In practice, it often meant the loss of federal recognition, the loss of services, threats to tribal land, and deeper poverty.

Termination used the language of equality while weakening Native power. That is one of the recurring patterns in the history of racial hierarchy. The law does not always announce itself as oppression. Sometimes it calls itself reform. Sometimes it claims to be helping people by stripping away the structures that allow them to survive.

Relocation worked beside termination. Native people were encouraged, and sometimes pressured, to leave reservations and move to cities. Federal officials promised jobs, training, and a better life. Some Native people built new lives in urban communities. But many others faced unemployment, poor housing, isolation, discrimination, and the loss of daily connection to tribal life. Relocation did not end racial hierarchy. It moved Native people into another version of it.

This is why the social status of Native Americans in this period cannot be understood only through statutes and court cases. The law mattered, but the law was not the whole story. The consequences appeared in ordinary life: underfunded schools, inadequate health care, poor housing, unemployment, police power, child removal, and federal agencies that treated Native communities as problems to be managed. White America often imagined Native people in two false ways: either as people of the past who were disappearing or as dependent people who needed federal control. Both images served racial hierarchy. One erased Native survival. The other justified federal dominance.

Native activism challenged both lies. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Native people forced the country to see that they had not disappeared and would not quietly accept assimilation. The Red Power movement, the occupation of Alcatraz beginning in 1969, the Trail of Broken Treaties in 1972, and the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 all demanded national attention. These actions were not merely protests. They were declarations of continued peoplehood.

Native activists insisted that treaties mattered. Land mattered. Tribal government mattered. Children mattered. Ceremony mattered. Language mattered. They were not asking simply to be included in American society on white terms. They were demanding the right of Native peoples to remain Native.

The Trail of Broken Treaties made that demand visible in Washington, D.C. Native activists brought their grievances directly to the federal government and exposed the long record of broken promises, destructive policy, and federal control. Their message was clear: the United States could not claim to be entering a new civil rights era while continuing to treat Native nations as wards, obstacles, or remnants of the past.

This activism helped push federal policy away from termination and toward self-determination. In 1970, President Richard Nixon sent Congress a special message on Indian affairs. He rejected termination and called for “self-determination without termination.” That was an important turn. The federal government publicly admitted that forced assimilation was not justice.

But self-determination did not mean full freedom. The United States did not surrender its power over Native nations. It changed the terms of control. The Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 allowed tribes to assume more responsibility for federal programs and services through contracts with the federal government. This mattered in daily life. It affected who ran schools, who shaped social services, who made decisions about health programs, and whether Native communities had any real say over institutions that touched them every day.

That was a real gain. But it was still limited. Tribes could administer programs, but Congress controlled the larger legal framework. Federal agencies controlled funding. Federal law continued to define the boundaries of tribal authority. Self-determination gave Native nations more room to move, but it did not remove the walls.

The Menominee Restoration Act of 1973 showed both the damage of termination and the importance of Native resistance. The Menominee Tribe had been terminated in the 1950s. Termination damaged the tribe’s political status and threatened its land and identity. After years of organizing, the Menominee won restoration of federal recognition. That victory mattered. It showed that Native people could force the federal government to reverse some of the damage it had done.

But restoration also revealed a hard truth. Federal law had claimed the power to take recognition away. Native people then had to fight to regain what should never have been taken. That is not equality. That is colonial power dressed in legal procedure.

Land remained central. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 resolved Alaska Native land claims through a structure unlike earlier federal Indian policy. It transferred land and money, but it also extinguished aboriginal land claims and placed ownership largely into Native corporations. This was not simple restoration. It was a legal compromise shaped by American property law and corporate law.

For Alaska Native peoples, land was not merely an economic asset. Land carried history, subsistence, identity, and spiritual meaning. ANCSA provided resources, but it also changed the legal form through which Alaska Native peoples related to land. Native claims were recognized, but they were translated into a form the United States could understand, regulate, and manage.

That is how racial hierarchy often works in modern law. It does not always say, “You have no rights.” Sometimes it says, “You may have rights, but only if those rights are reshaped into forms we recognize.”

The struggle over Native children was even more intimate. For generations, the United States had used schools, missions, adoption systems, and child welfare agencies to separate Native children from Native families. This was not only about individual children. It was about the future of Native peoples. A child taken from family, language, ceremony, and community was also taken from a people.

The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 responded to that crisis. Before ICWA, Native children were removed from their families at alarming rates and often placed with non-Native families or institutions. State child welfare systems frequently treated Native poverty, Native kinship structures, and Native community life as evidence of neglect. ICWA gave tribes a stronger role in child custody proceedings involving Native children and created standards meant to keep Native children connected to family, tribe, and culture.

ICWA matters because it recognized that child removal was not a private family-law issue alone. It was part of a larger history of racial and colonial control. For Native communities, sovereignty was not an abstract legal theory. It meant whether children would know their relatives, their people, their ceremonies, and their place in the world.

Religion and culture also came into focus during this period. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 declared a federal policy of protecting Native religious practices, including access to sacred sites, possession of sacred objects, and ceremonial worship. That recognition mattered because Native religious practices had long been suppressed, criminalized, or obstructed by federal law and policy.

But recognition was not the same as power. AIRFA acknowledged Native religious freedom, but it did not fully protect sacred places from government control, development, or destruction. The United States could recognize Native religion while still controlling the land and resources that made Native religion possible.

The Supreme Court also showed the contradictions of the self-determination era. In Santa Clara Pueblo v. Martinez, decided in 1978, the Court protected tribal sovereign immunity and limited federal court interference in internal tribal matters. The case involved a challenge to a tribal membership rule that treated the children of women differently from the children of men. The decision protected tribal self-government, but it also exposed a difficult tension between individual rights and collective sovereignty.

That same year, the Court decided Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. The Court held that tribal courts did not have inherent criminal jurisdiction over non-Indians unless Congress authorized it. This was a major limit on tribal sovereignty. It meant that Native nations could be denied authority over non-Native people who committed crimes on Native land.

This was not just a technical jurisdictional issue. It affected public safety, law enforcement, and the basic meaning of government. A government that cannot fully protect its people on its own land is not treated as fully sovereign.

By 1980, Native Americans had forced the United States to retreat from the most open forms of termination. That was a real victory. Native nations gained more room to govern, administer programs, protect children, assert religious freedom, and defend culture. Native activism had changed the national conversation. Federal policy had changed its language.

But this was not liberation. Poverty, underfunded services, land loss, jurisdictional limits, cultural suppression, and federal control remained. Congress could recognize, restore, fund, limit, or restructure Native authority. The Supreme Court could respect tribal sovereignty in one case and sharply restrict it in another. Native people had more tools, but the United States still claimed the power to define the boundaries.

The Native experience from 1965 to 1980 shows why racial hierarchy cannot be understood only as personal prejudice or unequal treatment. For Native peoples, racial hierarchy operated through colonial control. It shaped land, family, religion, education, political status, and public power. The self-determination era opened space for Native survival. It did not end the deeper structure. Native nations had forced the United States to change its language. They had not forced it to give up control.