The early 1950s featured truly awful federal leadership in Indian affairs, with Dillon Myer serving as Commissioner and Oscar Chapman as Interior Secretary. The leadership of the American Association on Indian Affairs wanted to produce a high-profile “bill of particulars” that would condemn the government’s terminationist actions. Other national activists resisted, worrying that direct political attacks on Interior Department leaders would backfire. While they debated, Felix Cohen wrote a 34 page memorandum detailing federal abuses, a paper he would shape into his classic Yale Law Journal article, The Erosion of Indian Rights, 1950-1953: A Case Study in Bureaucracy.
Here is the bill of particulars:


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