On Native Land

I wrote the post below originally on Facebook this past summer after looking up for the first time in my adult life the Indigenous land that I grew up on. You can do the same at https://native-land.ca/.

After becoming a state, in the California State Legislature’s first session in 1850, white legislators passed the Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. This law allowed any white person to apply to the Justice of the Peace for the removal of indigenous people from lands the white person “owned.” It also allowed any white person to obtain indigenous children for indentured servitude.

Over the first 15 years of California’s statehood, the state removed indigenous people from their land by military force. Between 1851 to 1859, the state comptroller tracked $1.3 million in claims for “expeditions against the Indians” (about $43 million in 2020 dollars).

In May of 1851, the Chochenyo Ohlone land I grew up on (as well as that of many other tribes) was transferred to the State of California in Cession 281, a swath of land encompassing all of Contra Costa and Alameda Counties, and stretching directly across the Central Valley all the way to the Sierras. This land was transferred to California in exchange for “a tract of land on the Stanislaus River,” in one of 18 similar treaties signed in 1851-1852 between the United States Indian Commissioners and the tribes. In March of 1852, both houses of the California Legislature overwhelmingly voted to submit resolutions to the US Senate opposing the ratification of those treaties, over concerns about any land being permanently transferred (as reservations) to indigenous people, making it “utterly impossible to prevent the continued collisions between the miners and the Indians.” The legislature proposed instead that, outside of any binding treaty, indigenous people be paid in “provisions and clothing,” and be given parcels of land “sufficient for them to cultivate,” noting that this would avoid “the contemplated permanent disposal of a large portion of our mineral and arable land [to the Indians]”. As a result, none of the 18 treaties were ratified by Congress. All votes on the treaties were in closed sessions, and the treaties were kept secret until 1905.

“That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected. While we cannot anticipate this result but with painful regret, the inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.” Governor Peter H. Burnett, January 7, 1851. Burnett was the first governor of California. Burnett Avenue in the Haight-Ashbury District is named after him.

The source for most quotes here is this 1992 California Research Bureau report.