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chapter six Citizenship and Termination On October 9, 1866, the Narragansetts met a joint legislative committee at the Ocean House in Charlestown. Its chairman told the tribe that the state was considering terminating their separate legal status and giving them full citizenship. The nation was moving toward civil equality for all men regardless of race or color, he noted, as exemplified by Congress’s recent passage of the Civil Rights Act. In addition, the legislature was concerned that the Narragansetts “should still claim to owe allegiance to their tribe, rather than to the State” and thought that “there ought to be no privileged class” in Rhode Island. The tribe was outraged by the suggestions. Though they had heard much about “negro citizenship and negro equality,” they had not found that such equality or rights existed anywhere. “We are not negroes; we are the heirs of Ninigret, and of the great chiefs of and warriors of the Narragansetts,” they told the officials, and “we are entitled to the rights and privileges guaranteed by your ancestors to ours by solemn treaty.” Now their “grasping neighbors, of a grasping race” were conspiring to take what remained of the tribe’s territory. Their individual allotments were mostly held by women, and termination would endanger their estates by forcing them to pay taxes and making them liable for debts. They did not want the right to vote and denied the legislature’s right to take “that which never came from you.”1 Between 1860 and 1880, inspired by a strange mixture of racism and egalitarianism , the three southern New England states ended the special legal status of nearly all Indians.2 The change developed gradually during the second quarter of the century, as a few groups had their lands allotted and legislatures became increasingly willing to allow emigrants to sell reserved land. But in 1859, Massachu- setts pledged to make Indians full citizens, and over the following decade worked to implement that goal, ending in 1870 with complete termination of all tribes and the division of remaining reserves. Connecticut moved during the same decade to terminate the Niantics and the Mohegans—by far the largest tribe in the state—but left the other groups, probably because they were all very small and managed by county courts. Rhode Island did modify the Narragansetts’ legal status after the 1866 hearing, turning the tribe into a corporation very much like modern Alaskan Native tribes, while continuing to protect the reserve from sale to outsiders. Fourteen years later, the state took a more dramatic step, quickly terminating the large tribe and auctioning its reservation to the public. While these laws reflected New England attitudes and state policies, they were also part of the national movement to eliminate Indian tribes and assimilate Native peoples. The shift in how Indians were perceived and treated was reflected in the instructions for the 1870 U.S. census, as census takers were told to include “Indians out of their tribal relations, and exercising the rights of citizens under State or Territorial laws,” and if living in a distinct neighborhood to make a special report on the group.3 The movement climaxed with the 1887 Dawes Act, named for its chief sponsor, Massachusetts senator Henry Dawes, which called for Indian agents to allot tribal lands throughout the nation, assign 160 acres to each adult member of the tribe and 80 to each child, sell the “surplus” at auction, end the legal existence of a tribe when all of its lands were allotted, and after a 25-year trust period end all federal oversight over Indian lands. But the laws passed by southern New England states actually resembled more the federal policy of termination in the 1950s, in which tribes were summarily extinguished and their resources divided or privatized with a minimum future role for government oversight.4 When termination and citizenship were suggested to several larger tribes before the Civil War, they were nearly unanimous in their opposition; the occasional lone voice calling for the change was quickly stilled. However, the war and Reconstruction emboldened those who sought change and apparently weakened the ability of elders to control dissent. When state commissions came to the same tribes after the war with the clear intention to end legal distinctions, they were drawn in part by petitions asking for changes and, once there, found a few strong voices speaking for full citizenship, particularly African American men. The Narragansett women who feared for their...

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