Among America’s many Indian tribes, there is much disagreement. Yet nearly all are united in support of tribal sovereignty and in rejecting federal termination policies—except in rare cases. Termination, a policy once promoted by the U.S. government to end the federal trust relationship with tribes, was largely discredited by the mid-1960s and formally renounced by federal policymakers in the early 1970s.
Notwithstanding this history, the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Reservation continues to defend the Ute Partition and Termination Act of 1954 (UPA). That Act removed 490 members of the Uintah Band—those deemed of “mixed-blood” descent—from federal recognition. The Uintah Band is one of the three constituent bands of the Northern Ute Tribe and is the only band holding treaty rights to the lands now occupied by the Ute Tribe in Utah.
By supporting the UPA, the Ute Tribe effectively undermines its own sovereignty in order to maintain divisions with the terminated Uintah Band members. On at least two occasions, the Ute Tribe opposed national efforts to revisit the law: it blocked resolutions calling on Congress to repeal the UPA at both the 2007 annual convention and the 2008 mid-year meeting of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI).
Any tribe that supports termination laws sets a dangerous precedent that jeopardizes the sovereignty of all tribes. Yet, by siding with the Ute Tribe’s position, the NCAI itself appears complicit in endorsing a policy long understood as destructive.
The distinction between “termination” and “disenrollment” is largely semantic. Termination was carried out by the federal government; disenrollment is carried out by tribes. Both result in the same outcome: the deliberate disenfranchisement of targeted individuals or groups—whether for economic, political, or discriminatory reasons.
Given the Ute Tribe’s continued defense of the UPA, Congress faces a stark choice: either repeal the Ute Partition Act entirely or enforce it fully—including the complete termination of the Ute Tribe as mandated under Public Law 671, § 23 of the 83rd Congress (25 U.S.C. § 677w)." Within three months after August 27, 1954, the business committee of the tribe representing the full-blood group thereof shall present to the Secretary a development program calculated to assist in making the tribe and the members thereof self-supporting, without any special Government assistance, with a view of eventually terminating all Federal supervision of the tribe and its members."
