Northern Ponca Restoration Day
In 1966, the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska was terminated by the federal government, removing more than 440 tribal members from the rolls and dissolving the tribe’s landholdings.
In the late 1980s, the Northern Ponca Restoration Committee was founded and began the process of trying to regain federal recognition.
In 1988, the committee successfully lobbied the Nebraska Legislature to grant state recognition and secured an endorsement to support becoming a federally recognized tribe.
By 1989, the Northern Ponca Restoration Committee drafted language for federal restoration of the Northern Ponca Tribe. The first challenge was to secure a member of the Nebraska Congressional delegation to sponsor the legislation. In 1989, Senator J. James Exon and Senator Bob Kerrey agreed to introduce and sponsor the Ponca Restoration Act in the United States Senate.
Achieving this same support in the House of Representatives proved to be much more difficult. Once language was added to the bill to specifically deny the Ponca Tribe the ability to establish a reservation, the bill passed unanimously. The process was completed on October 31, 1990, when then-President George Herbert Walker Bush signed the Ponca Restoration Act into law.
The Ponca Tribe of Nebraska is the name used to describe the Northern Ponca Tribe after the Tribe was officially restored in 1990.
