Southwestern Historical Quarterly

If remembered today, the National Tribal Chairmen's Association (NTCA) is recalled as a pawn of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), a force against change that opposed the Red Power activists of the early 1970s while serving as a force of exclusion, seeking to silence the voice of newly arising unrecognized tribes, urban Indians, and pan-Indian groups. As I revealed in my book, Claiming Tribal Identity (University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), scholars have not paid enough attention to the legitimate concerns of federally recognized tribes in seeking to protect valuable economic, political, and social capital in opposition to a chorus of competing groups seeking to speak for the "Indian people" in the modern era of tribal sovereignty and self-determination that began in the early 1970s. With this work, historian Thomas Britten has provided a valuable and nuanced examination of these contending constituencies and demands through the lens of the NTCA from its creation in 1971 to its demise during the Reagan years in 1987.

In clear prose, Britten details the efforts of the NTCA to influence developments in Indian policy during these important decades. As he notes, the chairmen's group claimed to be the only legitimate voice of Indian people due to its position as the representative body of duly elected tribal chairpersons. Until the mid-1980s when it reversed course (a stance that led to its demise, according to Britten), the NTCA strived to utilize its insider status, personal connections, and generally accommodationist strategy with the BIA (in the executive branch) and Congress to pursue its goals to improve the status of reservation-based Indians. National developments that the association influenced included helping to pass the landmark Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and other laws that protect Native children, trust lands, and natural resources. Britten concludes the NTCA was moderately successful in its lobbying and consulting work to defend recognized tribes from various efforts to erode tribal sovereignty posed by "backlash" groups over fishing and hunting rights, legal jurisdiction, and campaigns to end the BIA and the perceived dependency of Indian peoples on government funding.

Throughout the book, Britten attempts to offer assessments as to the efficacy of the NTCA's work in its various campaigns. As critics often noted, the association potentially was compromised and coopted because it received almost all its funding from the federal government, particularly the BIA. To this Britten argues the NTCA was able to resist cooptation due to its ability to reach out to the public and by having made itself "indispensable" to the government in providing data and information, recommendations on legislation, and meaningful consultation. However, once [End Page 503] its new executive director Elmer Savilla took charge in 1981 and took a clearly adversarial tone and stance toward the anti-tribal Reagan Administration, its funding was canceled in 1987, and the organization ceased to exist.

In its analyses regarding the impact of NTCA lobbying and political activities, the book is marred by a strong tendency to conclude with statements such as it "may never be known" or it "cannot be determined." This propensity is linked to the general absence of oral interviews, which if conducted correctly, could have rooted out the answers to these questions, given more voice to the participants, and strengthened the work overall. That said, the book is well-grounded in appropriate secondary sources as well as strong research into archival sources.

Voice of the Tribes should be on reading lists of serious students of federal Indian policy, modern Indian organizing, and tribal politics of the 1970s and 1980s. It is well written and fills an important gap in the literature on native politics during these decades.