Federal Indian policies of Termination and Relocation are heavy with meaning and memory for California Indians and all Native Americans. The Termination Era in federal Indian policy during the 1950s did not occur in a vacuum. It was not just a series of laws but a racist political ideology that came from many decades of genocidal and assimilationist policies that attacked Native nations. By the 1950s Native Americans had been subjected to numerous laws and policies aimed at assimilating them into the U.S. such as the reservation period, the extension of criminal legal jurisdiction over Indian lands, and Indian boarding schools. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, signed into law by president Andrew Jackson, violently relocated the Five Civilized Tribes and others from their homelands in present day Georgia and Mississippi to Indian Territory in Oklahoma. Many Native scholars consider the Indian Removal Act a precursor to the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 since both laws aimed to permanently remove Native peoples from their homelands. The assimilationist goals of termination and relocation also mirrored the goals of the boarding schools, which removed Indian children, often by force, from their families so they could be incorporated into white settler society as exploitable laborers. Termination and relocation, like Indian removal and boarding schools, were federal policies that sought a solution to the so-called “Indian problem.”

House Concurrent Resolution 108 was adopted by Congress in 1953. HCR 108 declared that “at the earliest possible time, all of the Indian tribes and the individual members thereof located within the States of California, Florida, New York and Texas, should be freed from Federal supervision and control and all disabilities and limitations specifically applicable to Indians.” HCR 108, also referred to as the Indian termination Act, targeted states with some of the highest populations of Native peoples in order to relieve the U.S. government from the legal and fiduciary obligations that it had committed to tribes via treaty and executive orders. Between 1945-1960 the U.S. gov’t processed 109 cases of Indian termination against tribes. The Rancheria Termination act of 1958 specifically targeted 41 California Indian Rancherias to dissolve their common land holdings and quit federal funding for services for their people. Only 27 of those tribes have regained their federal recognition to date. The Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a law intending to integrate American Indians into settler society as low wage exploitable workers, also had significant impacts on Native American peoples across the U.S who were pressured to move to urban areas away from their reservations and communities. However, California Indians and other Native peoples in places like Oakland organized together to provide support and community for one another. Community support and social life was important for Urban Indians who had lived in cities even prior to the relocation act and had long faced discrimination and racist violence in the cities. Public Law 280, passed in 1954, extended further state police jurisdiction over Indian reservations and Native American people in states with the highest Native populations, including California, in order to keep Native people subordinate and quell settler anxieties about possible uprisings like the ones that would explode in the late 1960s with AIM activism. The Termination Era is an example of ongoing colonial dispossession enacted against Native peoples by the U.S. government.