By the late 19th century the removal of the eastern tribes, the decimation of California peoples, a series of epidemics in the Plains, and the high mortality rates at boarding schools seemed to confirm that Indigenous peoples were “vanishing.” The belief that Native Americans would not survive long as a “race” provided a fundamental justification for all assimilationist policies. It also supported rationalizations that Indigenous views on legislation and public policy were immaterial. When it became obvious after about 1920 that Northern American’s aboriginal populations were actually increasing, the United States and Canada found themselves unprepared to acknowledge or advance the interests of these people.

In the United States a 1926 survey brought into clear focus the failings of the previous 40 years. The investigators found most Indians “extremely poor,” in bad health, without education, and isolated from the dominant Euro-American culture around them. Under the impetus of these findings and other pressures for reform, the U.S. Congress adopted the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which was designed to effect an orderly transition from federal control to Native self-government. The essentials of the new law were as follows: (1) allotment of tribal lands was prohibited, but tribes might assign use rights to individuals; (2) so-called surplus lands that had not been sold or granted to non-Indians could be returned to the tribes; (3) tribes could adopt written constitutions and charters of incorporation through which to manage their internal affairs; and (4) funds were authorized for the establishment of a revolving credit program which was to be used for land purchases, for educational assistance, and for helping the tribes to form governments. The terms of the act were universally applicable, but any particular nation could reject them through a referendum process.

The response to the Reorganization Act was indicative of the Indigenous peoples’ ability to rise above adversity. About 160 communities adopted written constitutions, some of which combined traditional practices with modern parliamentary methods. The revolving credit fund helped to improve tribal economies in many ways: native ranchers built up their herds, artisans were better able to market their work, and so forth. Educational and health services were also improved.

After 1871, when internal tribal matters had become the subject of U.S. legislation, the number and variety of regulatory measures regarding Native individuals multiplied rapidly. In the same year that the Indian Reorganization Act was passed, Congress took the significant step of repealing 12 statutes that had made it possible to hold Indigenous people virtual prisoners on their reservations. The recognition of tribal governments following the Reorganization Act seemed to awaken an interest in civic affairs beyond tribal boundaries. The earlier Snyder Act (1924) had extended citizenship to all Indigenous people born in the United States, opening the door to full participation in American civic life. But few took advantage of the law, and a number of states subsequently excluded them from the franchise. During the reorganization period, many native peoples successfully petitioned to regain the right to vote in state and federal elections. The major exception to this trend occurred in Arizona and New Mexico, which withheld enfranchisement until 1948 and granted it only after a lengthy lawsuit.

A number of nations had for many years sponsored tribal councils. These councils had functioned without federal sanction, although their members had represented tribal interests in various ways, such as leading delegations to Washington, D.C., to protest allotment. Reorganization gave tribes the opportunity to formalize these and other Indigenous institutions. Tribal governments soon initiated a number of lawsuits designed to regain land that had been taken in contravention of treaty agreements. Other lawsuits focused on the renewal of use rights, such as the right to hunt or fish, that had been guaranteed in some treaties.

These legal strategies for extending sovereignty were often very successful. The federal courts consistently upheld treaty rights and also found that ancestral lands could not be taken from an aboriginal nation, whether or not a treaty existed, “except in fair trade.” The fair trade argument was cited by the Hualapai against the Santa Fe Railway, which in 1944 was required to relinquish about 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) it thought it had been granted by the United States. A special Indian Claims Commission, created by an act of Congress on August 13, 1946, received petitions for land claims against the United States. Many land claims resulted in significant compensation, including nearly $14,800,000 to the Cherokee nation, $10,250,000 to the Muscogee tribe, $12,300,000 to the Seminoles, and $31,750,000 to the Ute.

Even as many tribes in the United States were regaining land or compensation, the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs instituted the Urban Indian Relocation Program. Initiated within the bureau in 1948 and supported by Congress from the 1950s on, the relocation program was designed to transform the predominantly rural native population into an assimilated urban workforce. The bureau established offices in a variety of destination cities, including Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, and St. Louis. Through program auspices, it promised to provide a variety of services to effect the transition to city life, including transportation from the reservation, financial assistance, help in finding housing and employment, and the like, although the distribution and quality of these services were often uneven. From 1948 to 1980, when the program ended, some 750,000 Native Americans are estimated to have relocated to cities, although not all did so under the official program and not all remained in urban areas permanently. Evaluations of its success vary, but it is clear that urban relocation helped to foster the sense of pan-Indian identity and activism that arose in the latter half of the 20th century.

Termination

The ultimate goals of assimilationist programming were to completely divest Native peoples of their cultural practices and to terminate their special relationship to the national government. Canada’s attempts at promoting these goals tended to focus on the individual, while those of the United States tended to focus on the community.

In Canada a variety of 19th-century policies had been emplaced to encourage individuals to give up their aboriginal status in favour of regular citizenship. Native people were prohibited from voting, serving in public office, owning land, attending public school, holding a business license, and a variety of other activities. These disincentives did not prove to be very strong motivating forces toward the voluntary termination of Native status. More successful were regulations that initiated the termination of status without an individual’s permission. For instance, until 1985, Indigenous women who married nonnative men automatically lost their aboriginal status; undertaking military service or earning a university degree could also initiate involuntary changes in status.

Major adjustments to Canada’s pro-termination policies did not occur until after World War II, when returning veterans and others began to agitate for change. In 1951 activists succeeded in eliminating many of the disincentives associated with Indigenous status. After years of prohibitions, for instance, native peoples regained the right to hold powwows and potlatches and to engage in various (if limited) forms of self-governance. The new policy also defined procedures for the reinstatement of aboriginal status, for which some 42,000 individuals applied within the first year of passage.

In the United States, termination efforts were handled somewhat differently. In 1954 the U.S. Department of the Interior began terminating federal control and support of tribes that had been deemed able to look after their own affairs. From 1954 to 1960, support to 61 Indigenous nations was ended by the withdrawal of federal services or trust supervision.

The results were problematic. Some extremely impoverished communities lost crucial services such as schools and clinics due to a lack of funds; in a number of cases, attempts to raise the capital with which to replace these services attracted unscrupulous business partners and further impoverished the community. The protests of tribal members and other activists became so insistent that the termination program began to be dismantled in 1960.

Native American became increasingly visible in the late 20th century as they sought to achieve a better life as defined on their own terms. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s, many drew attention to their causes through mass demonstrations and protests. Perhaps the most publicized of these actions were the 19-month seizure (1970–71) of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay (California) by members of the militant American Indian Movement (AIM) and the February 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, on the Oglala Sioux Pine Ridge (South Dakota) reservation.

During the 1960s and ’70s, native polities continued to capitalize on their legal successes and to expand their sphere of influence through the courts; forestry, mineral, casino gambling, and other rights involving tribal lands became the subjects of frequent litigation. Of the many cases filed, United States v. Washington (1974) had perhaps the most famous and far-reaching decision. More commonly referred to as the Boldt case, after the federal judge, George Boldt, who wrote the decision, this case established that treaty agreements entitled certain Northwest Coast and Plateau tribes to one-half of the fish taken in the state of Washington—and by implication in other states where tribes had similarly reserved the right to fish. In addition, some groups continued their efforts to regain sovereignty over or compensation for tribal lands. The most important results of the latter form of activism were the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), in which Alaska Natives received approximately 44 million acres (17.8 million hectares) of land and nearly $1 billion (U.S.) in exchange for land cessions, and the creation of Nunavut (1999), a new Canadian province predominantly administered by and for the Inuit.