That is an enormous thing to ask of anyone, and it is particularly enormous when the symbol and the reality are as far apart as they were for Hayes and his community.

The post-war years also saw significant changes in how the federal government approached its relationship with Native nations — changes that were not, in general, improvements.

The termination policy that gained momentum in the early 1950s was premised on the idea that the special legal status of tribal nations should be dissolved, that reservations should be ended, and that Native people should be assimilated into the general American population.

This policy, which was implemented most aggressively in the 1950s before being largely reversed in subsequent decades, represented a fundamental attack on the tribal sovereignty that Native communities had been fighting to protect for generations.