The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) was a pressure group formed in 1944 by a group of educated Native Americans.
It played an important role in extending the rights of Native Americans.
Significantly:
By involving ordinary NAs in the struggle to stop the end of the reservations and integrate the NA into ordinary society so that their livelihood was no longer funded by the taxpayer.
Much of its time was also involved in legal battles over discrimination:
1948 Harrison v. Laveen/ Austin v. Laveen
The first major victory was at state level when in 1948, two Native Americans brought a case concerning voting rights before the Arizona Supreme Court.
The two NAs, Frank Harrison and Harry Austin, belonged to the Mohawk-Apache tribe and lived on a reservation in Arizona.
The county recorder, Austin, refused to allow them to register to vote.
This decision was successfully challenged as a result of the NCAI and American Civil Liberties Union.
However, similar to the voting history of other minority groups in the US, other barriers prevented many from voting.
- Many natives in Arizona did not speak English, and thus could not access voting resources or pass English-language literacy tests.
- In 1948 it was estimated that 80–90% of Arizona Indians were illiterate and thus could not vote until literacy tests were made illegal in the 1970 Amendment to the Voting Rights Act.
- During termination, the NCAI also had difficulties because many NAs favoured termination.
- These were mostly the half-blood Indians who had moved to the cities and adopted the values and lifestyle of the white majority.
They stood to gain financially if they were to be reimbursed for tribal land sold as money was divided among tribe members.
Helen Peterson, a member of the Ogala Sioux and former director of the NCAI later recalled:
- The NCAI managed to prevent the termination of some tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Chippewa, but not the resource-rich Menominee and Klamath.