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US officials get tangled in the contradictions inherent in the attempt to legitimize empire building through the Doctrine of Discovery and the origin story of making a clear break from the British empire.

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 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.

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.

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

They said we must get civilized. I remember that word too. It means “be like the white man.”

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

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

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.