Perimeters of Democracy: Inverse Utopias and the Wartime Social Landscape in the American West

6. Termination of the Klamath Reservation: From Inverse Utopia to Indian Dystopia

chapter six From Inverse Utopia to Indian Dystopia Americans everywhere celebrated the dawn of a new era of peace and prosperity in 1950. In contrast, many former Topazians, Vanporters, and Los Alamosans struggled to recover from a decade of displacement, stigmatization, and involuntary dependency on government agencies that left them abandoned and alienated. Washington’s zeal for dissolving collectivist enclaves soon reached Indian Country as well. Ten years after Dillon Myer announced the closing of the wra camps in 1943, the federal government formally adopted a policy of termination in 1953. The destructive policy called for the dissolution of tribal entities and national homelands and the integration of labor and resources into the free market. Proponents argued that termination would liberate Indians from the shackles of federal dependency just as global capitalism might one day liberate the millions in Europe and Asia enslaved by Communism. The termination of the Klamath Reservation left individuals to sink or swim in the turbulent American mainstream, and they would go forth without a tribal land base, tribal institutions, or tribal community and culture as a life preserver. Like the Issei bachelors before them who languished in Chicago, Klamaths were set adrift by the federal government. Presented as a new progressive policy for Indians, termination was for most residents of Klamath the culmination of decades of failed policies Termination of the Klamath Reservation | 251 and bungled social engineering experiments that brought Indians from the dispossession of the 1840s to a tragic new phase of dispossession in the 1950s. The process of termination responded to the same historical forces behind the founding of the reservation, only this time Indians were enmified as “collectivists,” identified as useful to urban labor markets, dislocated in the name of demographic management, and “civilized” in a crash course on living as a mainstream wage laborer. Instead of isolating the tribes from the rest of America, termination made Klamaths invisible within it. Detribalization was more complex than the postwar changes in Topaz, Vanport, and even Los Alamos because of the longevity of the reservation system and the problem of Indians, and not just federal agencies, as landholders. Nevertheless, Klamath termination followed the larger patterns of inverse utopian history, as a full, detailed examination reveals. Well before the end of the war, federal legislators and bureaucrats began to consider which tribes might be prepared to live independently of their reservations and their “paternalistic” treaty relationships with the federal government. Congress and the oia—renamed the Bureau of Indian Affairs (bia) in 1947—placed the Klamath Reservation near the top of the list because of its wealth, its forward-thinking incorporation plan, and even the fact that Wade Crawford had served as superintendent. Like the Japanese internees and the valiant men of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, Klamaths had proven their loyalty though military service on the battlefield and the home front. Government officials and the general public saw Native participation in wartime as progress toward assimilation that had to be continued, not squandered on quasi-Communist reservations. Historians may never reach a consensus about how Indians’ participation in World War II altered—or failed to change—Native life, but most agree that it paved the way for the federal government to implement the relocation and termination policies in the 1950s. The government pursued both policies to sever the ties between Indians and their land, identity, and treaty rights. The War Relocation Authority had just dissolved its internment camps, and Vanport and Los Alamos were slated for disposal or normalization, so termination was part of a larger campaign to dissolve 252 | Termination of the Klamath Reservation all special relationships between specific communities and the government . When Dillon Myer took John Collier’s position as commissioner of the bia in 1950, he implemented the relocation and dispersal plans that garnered him such praise in bureaucratic circles. Attaching Indian reservations to the wave of federal community terminations might have seemed appropriate and opportune, particularly for reservations with a financial and statistical profile like that of the Klamath. Federal officials seemed not to recognize, however, that despite the similarities between the various federally managed communities, the government’s unique treaty relationship made a quick and simple severance impossible. In using external markers of tribal wealth and highly mediated images of the Klamath Tribes, the bia also ignored the complex difficulties of individual Indians struggling within the confines of the reservation system. As early as 1944...