“Ready to Be Terminated”: Guy Jennison and Ottawa Traditions of Autonomy through Elimination

Abstract

Abstract: The 1950s and 1960s policy of tribal termination is justly regarded as a genocidal federal effort to extinguish tribal sovereignty and identity. Some tribal leaders, however, like Guy Jennison, chief of the Ottawa Tribe of Oklahoma from 1930 to 1962, supported termination. Jennison’s advocacy for termination developed out of an Ottawa political tradition that sought greater autonomy through embracing federal policies aimed at tribal elimination. In this political tradition, the Ottawa endeavored to escape federal control through eliminatory policies while subverting the eliminatory intentions of policy-makers by ensconcing their community in other dimensions of the dominant society. For Jennison, endorsing termination was a strategy to escape federal paternalism and gain greater control over tribal affairs. In anticipation of termination, Jennison led the Ottawas to reestablish tribal government through a state-chartered nonprofit corporation; by perpetuating tribal identity and prerogatives through this vehicle, the Ottawa undermined the eliminatory intentions of termination policy. Placing Jennison’s advocacy for termination within a longer tradition of Ottawa activism reveals the Native intellectual genealogies that informed his perspective and demonstrates how policies intending tribal elimination represented a complex site of Ottawa struggle against federal authority.