When Lyndon Baines Johnson took the oath of office on November 22, 1963, he inherited a fragile, ambiguous federal Indian policy. The Kennedy administration had instituted reforms and deemphasized termination, but missed its opportunity to elucidate a coherent vision of its own. Indeed, scholars characterize the entire period from 1961 to 1975 as one of policy in transition. Not until 1975, in the wake of Richard Nixon’s Indian message of 1970, would Congress replace House Concurrent Resolution 108, the termination bill, with the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act But simply to glance over the preceding years, and particularly the administration of Lyndon Johnson, would ignore a period of dynamic and controversial change both at the federal level and in Indian communities. This article explores the Johnson administration’s most provocative and contested innovation, the Community Action Program (CAP), and how its philosophy of ”maximum feasible participation” served as the harbinger of tribal self-determination.
