Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950–59 (review)

In the second edition of American Indian Politics and the American Political System (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), University of Minnesota and Lumbee scholar David E. Wilkins characterizes House Concurrent Resolution (HCR) 108 as "the definitive statement of the termination policy" (120). Adopted by the House of Representatives and Senate in August 1953, HCR 108 authorized the United States to extinguish tribal status and revoke federal treaty rights. It was followed in rapid succession over the next nine years by additional bills targeting individual tribes for termination. One hundred and nine tribes in all were terminated. Tribal laws and governments were abolished. The United States sold the land of terminated tribes to the highest bidder; canceled health, housing, and educational programs; and removed people to urban areas far from their homes. However, in just two decades, grass roots resistance compelled the United States to change course. Richard Nixon described HCR 108 in July 1970 as "morally and legally unacceptable." In his "Special Message to the Congress on Indian Affairs," he called on Congress to "explicitly affirm the integrity and rights to continued existence of all Indian tribes and Alaskan Native governments," assure American Indian peoples that the United States would "carry out its treaty and trusteeship obligations," and guarantee that the United States would not relieve itself of these rights and responsibilities "without the consent of the Indians" (in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Richard Nixon: Containing the Public Messages, Speeches, and Statements of the President, 1970, Government Printing Office, 1975, 567; emphasis added).

Focusing mostly on what legislative activity led up to termination and on key white actors in Indian policy formation, termination historiography in many ways disempowers Indian peoples. It mind-bogglingly elides crucial political battles between tribal and state governments initiated among grass roots people in the 1950s that together established (or, perhaps more accurately, upheld) the principle "consent of the Indians." With publication of Not Without Our Consent: Lakota Resistance to Termination, 1950–1959, University of California, Davis, and Sicangu Lakota scholar Edward Charles Valandra brilliantly fills this critical gap in the literature. Investigating the Lakota Peoples' response to Public Law (PL) 83-280, which in 1953 authorized certain state governments to extend their civil and criminal jurisdictions over reservations without the approval of the affected tribal peoples, Valandra tells a compelling story of legal maneuvering that centers on capable, savvy actors who skillfully used the colonizer's political tools to fight back against terminationists in South Dakota.

Along with an introduction, afterward, several useful appendices, and a forward offered by the late Vine Deloria Jr., Not Without Our Consent is organized into three chapters. "U.S. Termination Policy, 1945–53," the first of these three chapters, establishes a familiar cultural context for making sense of HCR 180 and PL 280. It is a scathing indictment of what Valandra terms "political congeniality" (and "knee-jerk solidarity") and a disapproving explanation for why termination seemed reasonable to the terminationists. In his second chapter, "Lakota Termination-Ready Status: Zimmerman Applied," an effort to illustrate the circumstances of Lakota political resistance, Valandra establishes an economic and political context for understanding the rising antagonism in South Dakota among non-Lakota people through the E. Y. Berry Papers and an analysis of federal district court judge George T. Mickelson's 1956 ruling in Iron Crow v. The Ogallala Sioux Tribe of the Pine Ridge Reservation. "Iron Crow," Valandra argues, "proved the seminal event that, for South Dakota's white community, emotionally catalyzed them to launch a decades-long campaign to invoke PL 83-280 and to try to crush all Lakota governments, hoping to acquire as termination booty any remaining Lakota lands" (135). In "The 1958 Lakota Referenda," his third chapter, Valandra surveys legislative and judicial efforts in South Dakota to assume state jurisdiction over Lakota territory. His key concern, however, is the provision of South Dakota House Bill (HB) 892 that required a reservation-by...