Broken treaties
Monday, October 13 is Indigenous People’s Day.
Between 1776 and 1887, the U.S. seized more than 1.5 billion acres from Native Americans by treaty and executive order.
According to the National Park Service, over 500 treaties were made between the U.S. government and tribes. All were broken.
There are approximately 6.79 million Native Americans, which is about 2.09% of the U.S. population. There are 574 federally recognized tribes.
The last battle in CaliforniaThe Modocs who had attacked peace commissioners were imprisoned at Fort Klamath, where they were tried and convicted of murder. Four were hanged. The tribe was dispersed, with most members moved to Oklahoma.
In 1978 the Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma was federally recognized, and eight years later the Klamath Tribes, including the Modocs, were reinstated as federally recognized.
Sam Hilliard, a humanities professor at Louisiana State University, wrote an article, “Indian Land Cessions,” in which he mentions California’s history:
“Among the more calloused and unorthodox negotiations were those dealing with the California Indians around midcentury. Anticipating the Indian-White conflict that was sure to develop as a result of gold discovery, agents were dispatched from Washington to secure treaties with the California Indians, and a number were concluded in which the Indian groups gave up their territorial claims in return for reservations. However, pressure in Congress by Whites who wanted no land granted to California Indians blocked ratification of the treaties. Since the Indians already had abandoned their homelands for the new, nonexistent reservations, they were left landless. The 1840-1859 map shows the land ceded by the treaties in 1851 and the reservations ceded during the following period. But there were never any reservations; the land was simply appropriated.”
The National Park Service has a detailed history of the Modoc War in California here.
Attempt to set things rightLarisa K. Miller, associate archivist for the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, published a paper in 2013, “The Secret Treaties With California’s Indians,” regarding the unratified treaties in California. Miller’s paper details the work of lawyer Charles Edwin Kelsey, who represented the Northern California Indian Association in the early 1900s. Kelsey collaborated with California Sen. Thomas Bard, a member of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, to obtain legislation to right the wrong.
Their efforts emphasized that failure to enact the treaties had been disastrous to the Indians of Northern California.
A bill was signed in 1905 by President Theodore Roosevelt in which Kelsey was appointed to perform a survey of conditions. His report, delivered in the spring of 1906, led to an appropriation of $100,000 to purchase the first of what are now known as California’s Indian rancherias; another $50,000 followed in 1908. The appropriations were meant to provide homes for the tribes in Northern California who were without lands due to unratified treaties.
You can find a pdf of “The Secret Treaties With California’s Indians” here.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans embarked on a new campaign for rights in 1972 called the Trail of Broken Treaties.
On Oct. 6, 1972, three caravans departed from Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles for Washington, D.C. The demonstrators wound up initiating a weeklong occupation of a Bureau of Indian Affairs building, with some violent episodes.
The events did not have an immediate impact, but many of the group’s objectives were later made into policy.
You can learn a lot more about the Trail of Broken Treaties from the National Park Service here.
Here are the 10 states with the largest proportions of Native Americans in 2023:Alaska (19.94%)Oklahoma (13.46%)New Mexico (11.82%)South Dakota (9.77%)Montana (7.9%)North Dakota (6.21%)Arizona (5.65%)Wyoming (3.81%)Oregon (3.56%)Washington (3.16%)
California has the most Native Americans with 1.1 million, followed by Texas (586,406) and Oklahoma (555,598).
Sources: Sam Hilliard, Louisiana State University; Southern Illinois University Cartographic Laboratory; U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs; National Park Service; Larisa Miller; National Archives; U.S. Census Bureau
You can learn more about Sam Hilliard on the LSU site here.