IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II, political pressures mounted to get the federal government out of the Indian business by terminating trust responsibilities to tribes and emancipating them from the stifling paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The call for termination was both a repudiation of former Indian Commissioner John Collier's New Deal programs and a reaffirmation of earlier assimilationist assumptions and policies regarding Native Americans. As many terminationists noted, Indians had served well in the war and deserved something better than second-class citizenship. Surely people who had adjusted to military service and a world war were capable of looking after themselves. Surely they would want to enjoy that freedom and share its prerogatives. It was time for Indians to become part of mainstream American society.' Indian policy also reflected some of the postwar paranoia concerning the Soviet Union and the specter of communism. Critics had long decried Collier's programs as socialistic and even communistic and now, amid the tensions of the Cold War, many Americans idealized an individualistic society standing in dramatic counterpoint to the collectivism of our perceived enemies. Tribalism and the maintenance of a number of separate cultures within American society seemed unpatriotic as well as expensive. Many saw the BIA as a collection of entrenched bureaucrats wedded to un-American programs and determined to protect their own jobs.2 At one time or another during the postwar period, almost every tribe had to confront the possibility of termination. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, with more than 4,000 members, was no exception. Occupying a reservation of some 56,000 acres scattered over several counties in the mountains of western North Carolina, the Eastern Cherokees claimed descent from a small number of Indians who, through curious and complicated circumstances, remained in the Southeast after the Cherokee Nation was removed to present-day Oklahoma in 1838. They enjoyed federal recognition as a tribe and also operated under an 1889 state charter of incorporation. The Band's precise legal status had been a source of endless dispute, with both the state and federal governments exercising an undefined mixed (or concurrent) jurisdiction. Isolated from most Native Ameri-