LIBRARY
Watergate: President Nixon: Champion for Native Americans
Advancement of Native American Rights (RN Foundation)
Champion for Native Americans (RN Foundation)
President Nixon made several great strides in federal Indian policy, including:
- Returning the sacred Blue Lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in 1970.
- Enacting the Menominee Restoration Act, restoring the recognition of the previously terminated tribe in 1973.
- Signing the Indian Healthcare Act.
- Laid the groundwork for the signing of the Indian Self-Determination Act.
- Increasing the budget of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) by 214%.
- Establishing the first special office on Indian Water Rights.
- Passing the Indian Financing Act of 1974, a bill supporting tribal commercial development.
- Pledging that all available BIA funds be arranged to fit priorities set by tribal governments themselves.
President Nixon’s vision of self-determination for the first Americans ended two centuries of destructive federal policies, ushering in a new era for Native Americans to control their own destiny.
Nixon Quote
"It is long past time that the Indian policies of the Federal government began to recognize and build upon the capacities and insights of the Indian people. Both as a matter of Justice and as a matter of enlightened social policy, we must begin to act on the basis of what the Indians themselves have long been telling us. The time has come to break decisively with the past and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions." - President Richard Nixon
Books in WorldCat (may need to Interlibrary Loan)
American Indians/American Presidents by ISBN: 9780061466533Publication Date: 2009-08-11When the American colonies defeated Britain during the War for Independence, Native American leaders began to establish diplomatic relations with the new nation. Here, for the first time, is the little-known history of American Indians and American presidents, what they said and felt about one another, and what their words tell us about the history of the United States. Focused on major turning points in Native American history, these pages show how American Indians interpreted the power and prestige of the presidency, and advanced their own agenda for tribal sovereignty, from the age of George Washington to the present day. In addition to exploring a pantheon of Indian leaders, from Little Turtle to Robert Yellowtail, this book also provides new--and often unexpected--perspectives on the presidents. Thomas Jefferson, traditionally portrayed as the Indians' friend, emerges as a master of the art of Indian dispossession. Richard Nixon, long-tarnished by the Watergate scandal, was in reality a champion of tribal self-determination--a position that sprang, in part, from his Quaker origins. Using inaugural addresses, proclamations, Indian Agency records, private correspondence, memoirs, petitions, photographs, and objects from the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, American Indians/American Presidents illuminates the relationship between these diverse leaders, the Native Americans' commitment to tribal self-determination, and the social, geographic, and political evolution of the United States over more than two centuries.
