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In one of the largest of the relocation destinations, the San Francisco Bay Area, this would culminate in the eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz in the late 1960s.

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.

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 to

Native organizing, like the organization of the African American desegregation and voting rights movement, developed within the context of a nationalistic anticommunist ideology that intensified with the Cold War and nuclear arms race in the 1950s.

in 1953 “Operation Wetback,” as the federal program was called, forced the deportation of more than a million Mexican workers, in the process subjecting millions of US citizens of Mexican heritage to illegal search and arrest.

As national liberation movements surged in European colonies in Africa and Asia, the United States responded with counterinsurgency. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was formed in 1947 and expanded in size and global reach during the Eisenhower administration under director Allen Dulles,

When white vigilantes bombed and burned Black churches, it was said that “the communists” were doing it to gain sympathy for integration.

Activists’ efforts to end termination and secure restoration of land, particularly sacred sites, included Taos Pueblo’s sixty-four-year struggle with the US government to reclaim their sacred Blue Lake in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. In the first land restitution to any Indigenous nation, President Richard M. Nixon signed into effe

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.