American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Termination is something no Indian should ever dream about. It is like giving your eagle feather away. -Lucy Covington Colville tribal member INTRODUCTION Historians and scholars have interpreted the history of United States “Indian policy” in many ways: as a pendulum swinging between extremes of tribal sovereignty and tribal obliteration; as a roller coaster ride soaring and plummeting among programs calculated to assimilate Indian societies as abruptly as possible and those designed to cushion their transition into mainstream non-Indian life; as a steady march along that trail of broken treaties and irreparable cultural disintegration. Russel Lawrence Barsh wrote recently that rather than being ”a series of policy reversals driven by a dialectic of separation and assimilation,” federal Indian policy “has been marked by a diversity of forms, but a continuity of effect,” particularly in terms of land and resources. Barsh argues that the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act promoted by Indian commissioner John Collier was but a temporary slowdown of the bureaucratic push for assimilation of Indian peoples that was begun before the turn of the century; the disproportionate attention paid to Collier's ideas merely "strengthens the image of an heroic, Manichean struggle" and obscures the fact that the appropriation of Indian lands and the acculturation of Indian people have been the primary goals of the dominant society all along.