Mixed Race Studies

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)  [Review]

The Journal of American History
Volume 90, Number 3 (December 2003)
page 1107
DOI: 10.2307/3661030

David Rich Lewis, Professor of History
Utah State University, Logan

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah. By R. Warren Metcalf. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. xx, 305 pp., ISBN 0-8032-3201-2.)

In the 1950s the federal government reversed its pluralistic policies for revitalizing tribal governments and began terminating its trust responsibility under the guise of “freeing” American Indians from federal control. Termination policies flowed out of the conservative, budget-cutting, consensus rhetoric of Cold War America. As R. Warren Metcalf points out, its implementation varied, informed by the ideology of its practitioners and the circumstances of its subjects—specifically the Mormon cultural background of Arthur V. Watkins, Republican senator from Utah and chief advocate of termination in Congress, and the numerically small, powerless, and divided Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute Indians of Utah. Metcalf details the process whereby federal officials, Mormon politicians and lawyers, and Utes themselves accomplished the termination of mixed-blood members of the Northern Ute tribe despite the letter of the law and the bonds of racial identity. It is the story of identity politics that left individuals as “discarded” Indians…

Read the entire review here.

Termination’s Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah

University of Nebraska Press
2002
311 pages
Illus., maps
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8032-3201-3; Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8032-2251-9

R. Warren Metcalf, Associate Professor of United States History
University of Oklahoma

Termination’s Legacy describes how the federal policy of termination irrevocably affected the lives of a group of mixed-blood Ute Indians who made their home on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah. Following World War II many Native American communities were strongly encouraged to terminate their status as wards of the federal government and develop greater economic and political power for themselves. During this era, the rights of many Native communities came under siege, and the tribal status of some was terminated. Most of the terminated communities eventually regained tribal status and federal recognition in subsequent decades. But not all did.

The mixed-blood Utes fell outside the formal categories of classification by the federal government, they did not meet the essentialist expectations of some officials of the Mormon Church, and their regaining of tribal status potentially would have threatened those Utes already classified as tribal members on the reservation. Skillfully weaving together interviews and extensive archival research, R. Warren Metcalf traces the steps that led to the termination of the mixed-blood Utes’ tribal status and shows how and why this particular group of Native Americans was never formally recognized as “Indian” again. Their repeated failure to regain their tribal status throws into relief the volatile key issue of identity then and today for full- and mixed-blood Native Americans, the federal government, and the powerful Mormon Church in Utah.