A Legal Action to Repeal "The Ute Partition Act of 1954"
In this website is chronicled the history of the Ute Partition Act of 1954 (UPA) and the effects it has had on the Terminated mixed blood members of the Uinta band of Ute's and their action to repeal the "UPA". Read and learn the true facts about the Discrimination brought upon 490 once independent, self-supporting, productive American Indian's, who were reduced to welfare rolls in less then ten years.
No Unique Group of Americans illustrates the vulgarity of a failed federal policy more than the Mixed-Blood Uinta's of Utah. Who were once full members of the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation located in northeastern Utah and who find themselves "non grata" in the land of their birth....
"The Terminated Mixed-Blood's have been and are being denied Justice in the vain hope that time would banish them to the void, "a War of Attrition.""
A Government policy called termination, carried out in the early 1950's. A policy of assimilating American Indians into main stream American society which was allowed to go "awry". Assimilation designed to force American Indians out of their culture and told to forget their history.
Why have scholars and the mainstream media avoided the saga of the Mixed-Blood Uinta’s? Your first thought would be this doesn't happen in America, would seem the most obvious. But the real reason this story is ignored simply because they are not considered Indian enough and is a kind of “racial dualism” that is deeply rooted in Anglo-American thought, and this dualism carries over into scholarly dichotomies of “Indian and white.” (Warren Metcalf’s “Terminations Legacy” page 3) But the real reason is the vast amount of wealth powerful non-Indian individuals (Grifter's) and entities are receiving, surreptitiously, under the UPA by chicanery and claiming titular which is a canard!
With the passage of the Ute Partition Act (P.L. 671) it didn't take long to extirpate any opposition to termination and then dispossess the mixed-blood Uinta's of their desirable habitations by those determined to utterly ravage what vestige of Indian uniqueness they had. (Read Another Tea Pot Dome.)
After Fifty-Two Years, these once resourceful, creative people are still being decimated by federal policy, which is being manipulated by Devious Individual's for their own Political and Economic Gain!
Yet these Terminated Mixed-Blood Uinta's, after all these years, still up-hold and believe in the traditional values and culture they were born with.
Termination:
Step into the world of the Mixed-Blood Uinta Band of the Ute Indian Tribe, who had their Native American Indian identities taken from them, banished from the Northern Ute Indian Tribe.
Forbidden to practice their culture by an Act of Congress titled "The "Ute Partition Act of 1954," better known as Termination, which in reality is nothing but "Ex-termination." This group of Indians, denied due process, stripped of their human rights, forced to give up their identity, everything they cherished, forced to live in exile on the Land where they were born and forced to watch as Others use their Mixed-Blood identity to Economically Benefit from this so called Indian Emancipation, known as the "Ute Partition Act"!
In 1973, Congress repudiated termination as a policy and announced a new policy of "Indian Self-determination", What passed as a new and enlightened policy became a different strategy for continuing the policy of termination! And the policy of Termination is still alive today. Read this article by Ben NightHorse Campbell
Felter -v- Salazar:
In November of 2002, a civil action, titled "Felter vs. Kempthorne", was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. by terminated Uinta's, who were stripped of their citizenship in the Ute Indian Tribe, and their descendant's. Currently, over 600 Individuals have joined the case and are named as independent plaintiffs.
The pages of this Web Site contain information about the Termination of the Mixed-Blood's of the Uinta Band of the northern Ute Indian Tribe, and of the Lawsuit that was filed and is now pending in the U.S. District Court of Columbia, Washington D.C. Here is a link to the latest motions that have been filed.
Two Books' have been published about this struggle. And are titled "Termination's Legacy: The Discarded Indians of Utah" by R. Warren Metcalf and "The Dispossessed" by Parker Nielsen.
Why were a handful of people able to manipulate Congress and the Ute Indian Tribe into allowing this to happen?
We know how but the question is why were Non-Indians allowed to gain ownership, and control over assets of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation? Assets, which was mandate by Congress to go to individual Uinta's terminated from the Ute tribe, that was mandated by Congress to aid them in starting a new life!!