indigeneity

The latter was the goal of the 1956 Indian Relocation Act (Public Law 949). With BIA funding, any Indigenous individual or family could relocate to designated urban industrial areas—the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Dallas, Denver, Cleveland—where BIA offices were established to make housing and job training and placement available.

The experience of generations of Native Americans in on- and off-reservation boarding schools, run by the federal government or Christian missions, contributed significantly to the family and social dysfunction still found in Native communities.

That one of the most impoverished communities in the Americas would refuse a billion dollars demonstrates the relevance and significance of the land to the Sioux, not as an economic resource but as a relationship between people and place, a profound feature of the resilience of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Although the Senate subcommittee members finally agreed to the Taos claim by satisfying themselves that it was unique, it did in fact set a precedent.5 The return of Blue Lake as a sacred site begs the question of whether other Indigenous sacred sites remaining as national or state parks or as US Forest Service or Bureau of Land Management lands

As a result of their organizing, the government ceased enforcing termination in 1961, though the legislation remained on the books until its repeal in 1988.25 However, by 1960, more than a hundred Indigenous nations had been terminated. A few were later able to regain federal trusteeship through protracted court battles and demonstrations, which

fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical

Clearly the controversy was not about science, but rather about Native claims of antiquity, sovereignty, and rights, and settler resentment.

The US government has acknowledged some of these claims and has offered monetary compensation. However, since the upsurge of Indian rights movements in the 1960s, Indigenous nations have demanded restoration of treaty-guaranteed land rather than monetary compensation.

In hearings held in the preceding years by the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, members expressed fear of establishing a precedent in awarding land—based on ancient use, treaties, or aboriginal ownership—rather than monetary payment.