Collection: Directories and Documents > Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection

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Title: California Indians, Historians, and Ethnographers Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection # of Pages: 18 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

Date Scanned: 2024-09-03 14:34:42 OCR Software Version #: tesseract 5.4.1 Item Sourced From: PDF First Created: 2025-03-17 03:11:52 Last Updated: 2025-03-17 03:11:52

Original Held At: Searls Historical Library Location: 161 Nevada City Hwy, Nevada City, CA 95959

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The treaties that had been negotiated in 1851-1852 were rediscovered at the turn of the century, and outrage grew among Indians and advocates for Indians that the United States had taken land from California Indians without benefit of any treaty or payment. In the 1910s and 1920s, organizations joined forces to seek retribution for this wrong. The fact that many native Californians fought alongside other Americans in the armed services during World War I lent force to the cause and was in part responsible for citizenship being granted to Indians in 1924. In 1928, the California legislature passed a bill that authorized California Indians to sue the federal government for the value of those lands set aside for them in the unratified treaties. A federal law passed in 1946, the Indian Claims Commission Act, permitted Indians to present “any claims against the U.S. government the Indians and their attorneys might discover and for which petitions might be filed within five years.” Under these two measures, two successive claims cases were filed, resulting finally, to the disappointment of native Californians, in payments of only $150 each to the Indians included on the rolls prepared for the first case, and $668.51 to each of nearly 70,000 Indians on the rolls for the second case in 1972.2! The second claims case, especially, absorbed the interests of many of the state’s outstanding ethnographers in the 1950s and 1960s and resulted in the production of a number of documents invaluable for research purposes.” Some of these have been published by such publishers as Garland Press. Others must be sought in the archives of the federal Court of Claims. A prominent advocate for Indians in California in the 1920s, John Collier, was appointed commissioner of Indian affairs by President Roosevelt in the 1930s. One of the first commissioners to be well informed about Indian culture, Collier is nonetheless remembered with mixed feelings by California Indians. One of his major legacies was the Passageby Congress of the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which stopped allotment of land to individual Indians by repealing the Dawes Act of 1887, provided a revolving loan fund for economic develOpment on reservations, and established a framework for organizing tribal governments. As of May 1991, only twenty-one reservations and rancherias in California had constitutions organized under the terms of the IRA, which required approval of most decisions by the secretary of the interior.23 of As early as the 1930s, there were those who favored the termination of federal services to Indians, and in the 1950s, under Public Law 280, the federal government withdrew many services from California Indian communities that the BIA had provided, without completely removing the control the bureau exercised. Instead, the law transferred to the state the responsibility to provide many of the services that had been withdrawn, a responsibility the state took up only slowly, and in some respects not at all. The Rancheria Act, providing a mechanism for Indian groups to terminate themselves, was passed by Congress in 1958. Even though the terms of this legislation made termination disadvantageous, a number of rancherias did vote to terminate themselves after the act was passed.*4 Some of these have since been “unterminated” under new regulations.?5 In the early 1960s, after the disappointing negotiated settlement of the claims cases, native Californians organized a number of political action groups that crossed tribal boundaries. These included the American Indian Historical Society, the California Indian Education Association, the Inter-Tribal Council of California, and the California Rural Indian Health Board. The federal government, responding to the reformist political climate of the 1960s, made a number of programs established under the Office of Economic Opportunity available to Indians, along with funded programs initiated and managed by the various Indian associations. The history of these developments was recorded in the publications of the American Indian Historical Society, especially in its monthly newspaper, Wassaja. The society also published The Indian Historian, The Weewish Tree, and its annual Index to Literature. During this period, a number of Indian women came to the fore as Indian leaders. One of these was Juana °enn, descendant of the nets of the Wanakik Wanakik Cahuilla of San Gorgonio Pass in southern California. Penn served on the tribal council at Morongo Indian Reservation where she was in a position to hear about opportunities for training and education, and found young people to take advantage of them. She “trained” ethnographers, most notably Lowell John Bean.?6 With the help of an enthusiastic group of other Cahuillas and a number of non-Indians, she founded Malki Museum on Morongo Reservation and revived the annual Cahuilla fiestas. Malki Museum, in turn, FALL 1992 2297