170 An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
We must have a doctor, and we must have a school to educate
our children, and we must have a road upon the Klamath
River besides the bank of the river ....
My father was an Indian chief, and we used to own every
thing there. When the land was allotted they allotted him only
ten acres, a little farm of land which is mostly gravel and rock,
with little scrubby trees and redwood ....
Often we see a car go past. It is the Indian Service. Do you
suppose the man driving that car would stop? Always he has
no time for the Indians, and the car with some one from the
U.S.A. Indian Service goes past just like a tourist.15
Natives joined African Americans, Mexican Americans, and
Chinese immigrants as targets of individual racial discrimination
between the end of Reconstruction in the South in the l88os to the
mid-twentieth century. Jim Crow segregation reigned in the South,
where more than five thousand African Americans were lynched.1 6
As Black people fled terror and impoverishment in the South, their
populations grew in northern and midwestern cities where they still
faced discrimination and violence. Chicago, Tu lsa, and dozens of
other cities were marred by deadly "race riots" against African Amer
icans.17 The virulent and organized racism of the 1920s spilled over
to other peoples of darker hue. The pseudoscience of eugenics and
racial purity was more robust in the United States than in Europe,
further solidifying the ideology of white supremacy. For Indigenous
peoples, this was manifest in development of US government policy
measuring "blood quantum" in order to qualify for Indigenousness,
replacing culture (especially language) and self-identification. While
African Americans were classified as such by the measure of "one
drop of blood," Indigenous people were increasingly called to prove
their degree of ancestry as a significant fraction.NEW DEAL TO TERMINATION
Some relief for Indigenous nations came with the 1930s New Deal.
The Roosevelt administration's programs to combat economic col
lapse included an acknowledgment of Indigenous self-determina-