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Self-(de)(termi)NATION: the 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference

Summary/Abstract: The state of American Indian communities in the United States has historically been viewed as the aftermath of colonization, rooted in exterminations, removals, assimilation, and the 20th-century policies of termination and relocation. While colonization does, through historical trauma, affect presentday issues, since the mid-20th century, scholarship has propagated a more realistic image of American Indians. The 1961 American Indian Chicago Conference serves as a milestone in the change of perception, and is responsible for the creation of the “new Indian Idealism” that reestablished America’s Indigenous population as proactive agents and not merely reactive subjects in federal Indian policy. Indigenous self-determination, de jure secured by the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act but de facto hindered by federal paternalistic practices, was revitalized at the 1961 Chicago conference and thus American Indian communities were given the opportunity to complete the cycle from NATION, through termination and determination, to Self-determiNATION.

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