Lyndon Johnson is sometimes hailed as the civil rights president, the White House occupant who did the most to advance the cause of justice for African Americans. But what did LBJ do for Native Americans? Not as much as one might expect. Johnson failed to repudiate termination, the post-1945 policy that sought to eliminate the rights of tribes. He showed little interest in American Indians until 1968, an election-year, when he issued a message on Native American policy. To be sure, his record contained some positive aspects. LBJ's War on Poverty empowered poor people to design and administer programs under the Community Action Program, which covered Indian tribes as well as various units of local governance. The result was a boost to tribal rights and grassroots organizing that abetted Indigenous self-determination in the United States. Yet LBJ understood little of this change. Steeped in assimilationist thinking, Johnson and his advisers, like liberals in Congress, pressed for the integration of American Indians within the wider American mainstream. In so doing, they overlooked the unique aspirations of Indigenous peoples who sought to retain their cultural autonomy and unique treaty rights with the U.S. government. Missed opportunities, unintended consequences, and halting steps toward self-determination defined LBJ's Native American policy.

Dean J. Kotlowski is Visiting ANU Fellow, Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of History at Salisbury University. He is the author of Nixon’s Civil Rights: Politics, Principle, and Policy (Harvard University Press, 2001) and Paul V. McNutt and the Age of FDR (Indiana University Press, 2015) and the editor of The European Union: From Jean Monnet to the Euro (Ohio University Press, 2000).

He has published over forty articles and book chapters on U.S. political and policy history, including in journals such as Diplomatic History, Pacific Historical Review, Journal of Policy History, The Historian, and Business History Review. He has served four times as a Fulbright scholar, in the Philippines (2008), Austria (2016), and Australia (2020, 2022) and has been an historical adviser to the U.S. National Archives, Richard Nixon Library, and U.S. Mint. His next book, Toward Self-Determination: Federal Indian Policy from Truman to Clinton, is under contract with University of North Carolina Press.