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Termination And Relocation Essay

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Termination And Relocation Essay
Growing up in the United States many of us have had the security of having a place to call home as well as a supportive community. Imagining what it was like to lose the community and safe home can be hard to imagine, but was a difficult reality for the Native Americans because of termination and relocation. Termination and Relocation was the United States government’s idea on how they could make the tribes life better by assimilating them into what the government consider to be civilized.
Termination was the US government taking away tribal sovereignty and land from the Natives. Sovereignty can be defined as ruling over one’s people as an independent country. The person who is credited for termination is known as Arthur Watkins. Watkins thought …show more content…
Some relocation was done voluntarily, but tribes were feeling pressured to apply for relocation. A common complaint according to American Indian affairs, “Indians do not relocate voluntarily but under pressure of relentless urging, unscrupulous portrayal of prosperous urban life, withheld welfare assistance, and unnamed reprisals against their families.”, it is not specified who made the compliant because the American Indian Affairs record of complaints are anonymous. With pressure from the government, not receiving financial support, and punishments against their family many natives felt the need to sign up for relocation. To further explain the complaint the urban life was made to sound like it was a wonderful life and was better than life on the reservation. When the tribe member would get their relocation area they would often find housing conditions poor. The homes were usually in the more run down parts of towns and as Donald L Fixico states from his book Termination and Relocation Federal Indian Policy, 1945-1960, “As more families mover to these areas, Indian ghettos developed. Frustration and discouragement compounded homesickness, prompting many to leave the cities.” Many people would started to go back to the reservation because life was better there than in the ghettos. Relocation was not working as it should have in theory.
Termination and relocation were just fancy words for we are trying
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