The Dispossessed: Cultural Genocide of the Mixed-Blood Utes, an Advocate's Chronicle.
In this disturbing and provocative study, Salt Lake City attorney Parker M Nielson chronicles the termination of the mixed-blood Utes from the Northern Ute Indian Tribe. He outlines how the termination process, initiated by Utah Senator Arthur V Watkins, was visited on the Utes in a singular action by the U.S Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the only partial termination of any tribe in the nation. Termination for the mixedbloods meant loss of both tribal membership and any further claims upon the Bureau of Indian Affairs, similar to the impact of the termination policy upon other tribes in the 1950s. But for the mixed-blood terminated the losses went much further than being cut off from government assistance.
Nielson, with first-hand information gained as legal representative for the terminated Utes, details how the separation of the terminees from tribal membership proved devastating as they were misrepresented, lied to, tricked, and cheated out of their cultural and financial heritage His condemnation of everyone involved—including the U.S Congress, the BIA, the Ute Tribal Business Committee, the Ute Tribe as a whole, First Security Bank and its officers, the Federal Securities Commission, fellow attorneys, residents of the Uintah Basin, federal judges, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, even the United States Supreme Court, makes for an interesting, if one-sided, read Perhaps those tarred the blackest in this myopic view are the Mormon church and its members. Nielson launches a diatribe against Mormons at every possible turn, even when it takes a leap of logic to see the church's remote involvement This study focuses so narrowly on what happened to the mixed-blood Utes that it becomes a victimization story with the Mormon church as the scapegoat, leaving many of his meritorious points shadowed under clouds of animosity and bias.
The author's writing is contrived and often awkward. He uses metaphors that have little to do with his point, and throughout the work jumps from idea to idea with little or no transition. He frequenuy jumbles chronology in a way that will confuse readers unacquainted with the sequence of events Repeatedly, he adds first-person information in the form of thoughts and hopes of the terminees that he was not privy to He overlooks, until the epilogue, the fact that one-third of the Northern Ute Tribe is still full-blood Uintah Utes who maintained tribal membership.
Nielson offers a good outline of the Eisenhower-era termination laws aimed at forced assimilation of Native Americans However, without a prior understanding of U.S. reservation policy, the Spanish Fork Treaty, the Dawes Act, the Indian Reorganization Act, the Termination Act, and the 27%-63% split of non-dividable assets between the terminated mixed-bloods and the rest of the Ute Tribe, many readers will be lost and confused This book, though valuable for its specific detail and its personalization of this reprehensible chapter in Native American history, is not likely to be the final word on the subject As a moving case study with specific detail of how congressional action affected individuals in an arbitrary and heartless way, it is recommended to anyone interested in Ute history and Native American history of the twentieth century. However, when Nielson is finished, only the mixedbloods and he alone stand untarnished in this shameful misdeed.
By PARKER M NIELSON (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998 x + 338 pp $34.95.)