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Magistrate Will Study Lawsuit Aimed at Ute Termination Act | 1992

A lawsuit questioning the legality of the 1954 Ute Termination Act has been referred to U.S. Federal Magistrate Ronald Boyce for a ruling.

The case was filed by James F. Gardner and names the United States and Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan as defendants, claiming unlawful discriminatory treatment of Gardner and other terminated members of the Uintah Band of the Ute Tribe.The Ute Termination Act removed all individuals with less than five-eighths Ute blood quantum from tribal rolls regardless of band affiliation.

In his lawsuit, Gardner contends that the majority of those taken off tribal rolls were from the Uintah Band and that they were deprived of their ancestral rights as Indians. Gardner's mother, Carma Colleen Reed Gardner, the mother of 14 children designated as mixed-bloods, was one of 490 mixed-blood Utes who were terminated in the 1954 Act.

Gardner contends his mother, a minor at the time of the Termination Act, never received proper distribution of reservation resources and assets guaranteed in the act, and that those assets have been wrongfully held in trust by the federal government.

The suit further states that the Termination Act made no express congressional declaration or reference that natural descendants of the terminated mixed-bloods were subject to the termination, yet none of the descendants have been allowed to regain status as Ute members on tribal rolls.

Gardner is seeking a judgment for restoration and "rightful membership in the Ute Indian Tribe" and the Uintah Band, as well as recognition by the federal government as an American Indian, restored interests in tribal assets and "just compensation for lost property rights, violated civil rights and psychological grief and suffering endured over the past 29 years."

This is the first time the legality of the Termination Act itself has been challenged in federal court.

The Ute Tribe remains steadfast in its stand against allowing terminated mixed-bloods and their children from membership in the tribe. The Ute Tribal Business Committee last year, reaffirmed a resolution declaring "all persons classified as terminated Utes and such person's offspring to be neither members of the Indian community of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation."

Published: May 21, 1992, 12:00 a.m. MDT by Deseret News


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