American Indian Culture and Research Journal

As far as the eye can see and beyond, the hills and mountains, the deserts, even the coastal islands-all was once part of aboriginal territory. Then came Europeans and Americans. The rest is history, as they say. Today we are witnessing a small uprising, in that American Indians (or Native Americans, as many prefer to be called) have become increasingly proactive with respect to indigenous land and cultural resources. Local Indian communities again and again protest the lack of access to, or protection of, sacred places, burial grounds, and historic sites; assert claim to various aboriginal locales; and act as watchdogs during site developments. Opponents of these continuing Indian land claims either fail to comprehend law and policy, misread history, or just refuse to acknowledge that indigenous rights are thwarted because of inequities in the “system.”They do not want to accept the fact that land still remains the crucial issue in linking Indians to their past, their religions, and their lifestyles. Perhaps these opponents presume that land claims litigation is an event of the past; that the retirement of the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) in 1978 closed the books forever on virtually all land matters. True, two California claims cases-both known as Indians of California vs. United States-were successfully litigated by the Indians of California, a legal entity, and monetary awards, however meager, were made to Indians up through the early 1970s. Indian and non-Indian critics alike suggest that this litigation did far more to assuage our feelings of guilt than it did to restore any landed status to Indians. Also, as a point of fact, most Indian reservations were established in the last century; in Southern California, their final establishment occurred between 1875 and 1892. For most people, the bases and the methods employed to establish reservations are lost in the past. Why, then, have these events of justice and administration not ended the Indian land question locally?