"Anyone who has visited the Menominee Reservation in northern Wisconsin knows the grinding poverty that has devastated the Tribe, despite its best efforts to be the self-sufficient entity it once was.

Now, new research identifies the federal government's 1954 termination of the tribe's federal recognition as the cause of economic and social ravages that have lasted for four decades.

Despite warnings from officials in the Tribe and the State of Wisconsin, the federal government deeded away Menominee's trust lands, stripped it of the ability to govern itself and declared its members to be non-Indians ineligible for programs available to Indian people.

Members sold their land because they couldn't afford the taxes and moved away in search of jobs and services. A hospital and clinic closed, use of drugs and alcohol rose, the telephone and electric companies were sold, and there were fewer funds for students and schools.

Menominee was one of the only large tribes in the nation and the only one in Wisconsin to suffer termination.

The destructive termination experiment ended in 1973 when the federal government acknowledged its mistake and restored Menominee as a federally recognized Tribe. But scars remain to this day."

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