Lecture: Indigenous Survivance and Self-Determination
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 5
Opening
Picture a community center on a busy city street. One night a week, people share a meal there. Some came for a job workshop, and some came only to see friends. The families at the long tables come from many different places, and this center is where they found each other. You could walk past a building like that every day and never wonder how it got there. In this lecture, I want you to wonder.
Last week, in Week 4, you learned that Native nations govern themselves. You learned that tribal sovereignty is the inherent right of Native nations to govern themselves, so tribal citizenship is a political status, not a racial category. You read treaties, removal, allotment, and the boarding schools, and you met Wolfe's argument from 2006 that settler colonialism is an ongoing structure, not a single past event. In Week 3, you met assimilation, and you drew the line between immigrant peoples and colonized or incorporated peoples.
This week asks what came next. How did Native nations govern, resist, and endure in the twentieth century? We'll walk through citizenship and tribal government, then termination and relocation, then one family's account from the course archive. After that comes Red Power and the occupation of Alcatraz, then self-determination and the return of ancestors, and finally a word that ties it all together: survivance. One promise before we start. Every Native nation in this lecture is spoken of in the present tense, because these nations are still here.
1. Citizenship, the vote, and tribal government
Think about two pieces of paper: a birth certificate and a voter registration card. Most people assume the first one brings the second one with it. For Native Americans in the twentieth century, those two papers did not arrive together.
The Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States. That's a big change, and it's worth saying plainly. But the act did not settle the vote. The right to vote was governed by state law, and some states barred Native Americans from voting until 1957. So citizenship came from Congress, and the ballot depended on where a person lived.
Let's put a number on that gap. The act came in 1924, and the last of those state bars lasted until 1957. Take 1924 away from 1957 and you get 33 years. That means a person who was a young adult when the act passed could be middle-aged before every state let Native people vote.
Ten years after the citizenship act came a law about government. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 is described by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as establishing modern tribal governments. And here's a fact that surprises a lot of people. A Native person can hold two citizenships at once. One is in the United States, and the other is in their own nation. That fits what you learned in Week 4. Tribal citizenship is a political status, so becoming a U.S. citizen didn't erase it.
Pause and try this. A classmate says the 1924 act gave every Native person the vote. Using the year 1957, what's wrong with that claim?
Give it a moment, and say your fix out loud.
Here's the answer. The act granted citizenship, but the vote stayed under state law. Some states barred Native Americans from voting until 1957, which is 33 years after 1924, so the act did not bring the vote everywhere at once.
2. Termination and relocation
Imagine your city closes the school in your neighborhood. It buses every child across town and calls it a fresh start. The families call it losing their school. Who's right depends on what each side gained and what each side lost. Keep that picture in mind, because in the 1950s the federal government made two choices that worked a lot like that, on a far larger scale.
The first choice was termination. Termination is the federal policy, set by House Concurrent Resolution 108 in 1953, of ending the United States' government-to-government relationship with a tribe. According to the National Archives, Congress began 60 termination proceedings from 1953 to 1970. That's a span of 17 years, and tribes gave up a great deal of land along the way.
The second choice was relocation. Relocation is the federal program that moved Native people from reservations to cities for jobs. Relocation offices opened in 1951 in Denver, Salt Lake City, and Los Angeles. Then the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 authorized a vocational training program for adult Native Americans living on or near reservations. Count the gap and you get 5 years between the offices and the law.
Now let's read these two policies with tools you already own. With the assimilation framework from Week 3, both policies pushed toward assimilation. One ended a tribe's federal relationship, and the other moved its people into city wage work. With Wolfe's framework, they show settler colonialism as a structure that kept going long after removal. One honest caveat, though. A framework is a tool, and no framework settles a real case on its own. You still have to read the record.
Pause and try this. Families signed up for relocation, and nobody was forced onto the bus. Does that make it a program with no federal goal?
Think about who opened the offices before you answer.
Here's the answer. No. Federal offices opened in 1951, and a federal law came in 1956, in the same years as termination. A family's choice and a government's goal can both be real at once, so you ask what the government wanted, not only what each family chose.
3. Reading E4 against the record
A law and a memory answer different questions. A law tells you what a program authorized. A person's account tells you what it was like to live through it. The course archive is an illustrative, unnamed public library's collection, built for this course. Its excerpts are identified by role and decade, and none of them is a real person's words.
Excerpt E4 comes from a man whose family moved to a city under the federal relocation program in the late 1950s. He was interviewed in the 2000s. He was nine when the family got on the bus. The relocation office promised his father job training and an apartment. The apartment was real, he says, and the job lasted four months. His mother found the Indian center, where they met families from a dozen nations. He learned his nation's language from his grandmother on summer visits home. His children are citizens of his nation. And he ends with four words: "We are still here."
Let's walk the reading in the field's order. What does it say? It tells you about a promise, a short job, and a center that became a gathering place. Who made it? A narrator, decades later, telling how relocation felt to one family. Whom did it affect? A father, a mother, a child, and later the child's own children. What does it leave out? It doesn't name the city, the nation, or the year. So you check its dates against the record. The offices opened in 1951, the law came in 1956, and a late-1950s move falls after both.
Now add a comparison. The archive's E3 excerpt comes from a nurse who came after the 1965 immigration law, from another country, to work. E4's family moved inside the country, as citizens of a nation incorporated by conquest, under a federal program. So E4 isn't an immigrant story.
Pause and try this. Name one thing E4 tells you that the 1956 law could never tell you.
Pick one detail from the excerpt and hold onto it.
Here's the answer. The law can say what training was authorized, but only the account tells you the job lasted four months and that the family found each other at the Indian center. The record gives you what was promised; the voice gives you what it meant.
4. Red Power and Alcatraz
Think of a campus protest you've seen or read about. A group takes over a building or a lawn, makes a list of demands, and stays until someone listens. The place matters, but being seen matters more.
Red Power is the Native movement of the late 1960s and 1970s for sovereignty, treaty rights, and self-determination. One of its actions happened on an island in San Francisco Bay. Indians of All Tribes, people from many Native nations, occupied Alcatraz Island from November 1969 to June 1971.
Let's count how long that was. November 1969 to November 1970 is 12 months. November 1970 to June 1971 is 7 more. Add 12 and 7 and you get 19 months on the island. The National Park Service states that afterward, the official policy of termination ended and self-determination became official policy.
This is also a place to connect groups. In Week 1, you met the campus strikes of 1968 and 1969, when students of many backgrounds pressed for ethnic studies. The course places Alcatraz on the same movements thread. Both were coalitions. Indians of All Tribes joined people from many Native nations, much like the Indian center in E4 gathered families from a dozen nations.
Pause and try this. The occupation ended, and the island emptied. Does that mean it changed nothing?
Think about what the National Park Service says came afterward.
Here's the answer. No. The National Park Service states that afterward the official policy of termination ended and self-determination became official policy. You read an action by what followed it, not only by how it ended.
5. Self-determination and return
Picture an elders' language class that meets in a community building. For years, an outside agency ran that building and picked its programs. Then the community took it over. It hired its own teachers and set its own schedule. Running your own programs is the plain idea here.
Self-determination is the federal policy, written into law by the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, under which tribes run their own programs and services instead of having the federal government run them. The Bureau of Indian Affairs describes the 1975 act as following the activism of the 1960s and 1970s. Count from the termination resolution in 1953 to this act in 1975, and you get 22 years. In that time, federal policy turned from ending tribes' relationship with the United States to writing tribes' own control into law.
The second idea here is return. Repatriation is the return of ancestors' remains and cultural items to the people they belong to. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funds to repatriate Native American human remains and other cultural items. That happens through consultation with lineal descendants, Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations. It came 15 years after the 1975 act. The course places this law on its thread of apology, redress, and return.
Here's the limitation I want you to notice. A law that requires return doesn't do the work by itself. The nations take part in the decisions, and they carry much of the work. The language class makes the same point at a smaller size. A law can open a door, and the community does the teaching.
Pause and try this. Does self-determination mean the federal relationship ended?
Think back to what termination tried to do.
Here's the answer. No. Termination tried to end the relationship, and self-determination works inside it. Under the 1975 act, tribes run their own programs, and the government-to-government relationship continues.
6. Survivance and the present
Think about how a movie about the past often ends. The last scene fades to quiet, and the people in it seem to belong only to history. A lot of stories about Native nations have ended that way. This last idea answers that ending.
Survivance is a term associated with the Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor. It joins survival and resistance to describe Native presence that is active and continuing, not a story of disappearance. Survival alone would mean outlasting something. Survivance adds what people kept and built while they outlasted it: languages, centers, an occupied island, and new federal laws.
There's one more term that belongs here. Federal recognition is the United States' formal acknowledgment of a tribe as a nation with which it keeps a government-to-government relationship. The Bureau of Indian Affairs lists 575 federally recognized tribes "at present". Notice those two words, "at present". The count changes, so we never treat it as a fixed number to memorize. It's a record of nations of the present.
Now go back to E4's last line. He says his children are citizens of his nation, and then, "We are still here." The family outlasted a job that lasted four months and a move far from home. That's survival. He also learned his nation's language from his grandmother, and his children are citizens of their nation. That's resistance, the part that keeps something alive.
Pause and try this. Is "We are still here" survival alone, or survivance?
Use both halves of the definition before you decide.
Here's the answer. It's survivance. The line joins outlasting relocation with keeping a nation's language and citizenship alive, and that active, continuing presence is what the word names.
Closing
Let me pull it together. The 1924 act granted citizenship, but the vote stayed under state law until as late as 1957, and the 1934 act established modern tribal governments. Termination, set in 1953, and relocation, with offices in 1951 and a law in 1956, were federal policies with a federal goal. E4 shows why you read a record and a voice together, and why its dates get checked. Indians of All Tribes held Alcatraz for 19 months, and the policy of termination ended afterward. The 1975 act wrote self-determination into law, and the 1990 law requires repatriation through consultation. And survivance names presence that is active and continuing.
Later in this module, the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz let you work with these ideas yourself. The Community History Workshop then puts E4 on the timeline in your own words. Next week, in Week 6, the course turns to African American experiences, starting with slavery, emancipation, and Jim Crow. You'll read how law made and unmade slavery, using the same careful reading you practiced on E4.
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