Seeking Recognition: The Termination and Restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, 1855-1984 (review)

To the average American, "termination" means receiving a pink slip or an unwelcome visit from Arnold Schwarzenegger. For Native Americans, the word carries more sinister connotations of political dissolution and cultural annihilation, evoking a time not long ago when the United States tried to escape its trust responsibilities and force targeted tribes into the American "mainstream." The fact that so few people have heard of this dark period in Indian affairs is, in part, a reflection of how little scholars have written about it. Although several important case studies are in the offing, most of the existing literature focuses on the origins and implementation of national policy or its impact on larger, landed tribes—with David R. M. Beck's own two-volume history of the Menominees providing a case in point. In Seeking Recognition, Beck aims to redress this imbalance by focusing on the obscure Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw peoples of southwestern Oregon. Situating their experience within a longer history of "quasi-recognition" (xi), he clearly demonstrates how specific historical and regional contexts shaped the actual process of termination. Perhaps more important (if sometimes less successful) is his emphasis on Native agency and tribal voices as a means of "decolonizing the telling of history" (xv) and presenting "a lesson in hope, perseverance, and triumph—sometimes modest, sometimes spectacular—in the face of change" (xiii).

The subtitle notwithstanding, only half of Seeking Recognition details the termination and restoration of the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw tribes. Five of its ten chapters cover the period from "time immemorial" (1) to the early 1950s, and in some ways this background is the most interesting part of the book. After outlining the aboriginal culture of Oregon's coastal Indians, Beck explains how the federal government's failure to ratify the 1855 Empire Treaty effectively "established the pattern of treatment that the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw would endure for the next century" (16). They suffered from rampant violence and land loss as American settlers flooded their territory, yet most refused to remain on the executive-order Coast Reservation (soon reduced and allotted), despite repeated efforts to move them there. Consequently, they received little attention from the Office of Indian Affairs and made their own adjustments to life on the margins of white society. Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw families became integrated into the local economy while maintaining traditional subsistence practices and a measure of political independence from the confederated Grand Ronde and Siletz tribes. In 1917 the off-reservation groups formed a separate tribal government to represent their common interests and press their land claims in federal court. Their quasi-recognized status continued to haunt them, however, as both the Court of Claims and the Indian Claims Commission dismissed their oral testimony and nonratified treaty as insufficient evidence to establish legal title.

Building on this historical foundation, the book's second half explains the process that led to the termination of sixty tribes and bands in western Oregon, including the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw. This portion of the narrative tends to focus on the actions of bureaucrats and politicians at both the federal and state levels, revealing the significance of Oregon's eagerness to become a model for national policy. As Beck himself notes, however, the virtual disappearance of Indians from the discussion "reflects their place in the conscience and consciousness both of the policymakers deciding their future and of the public at large" (164). Since the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw had long been virtually invisible, he argues, "their termination was accomplished with but the faintest realization by federal officials that they were even doing it to them or what the long-term impacts would be" (164). The effects, as elsewhere in Indian Country, proved to be disastrous. Following the passage of Public Law 588 in 1954, tribal members lost their property interests, access to the...