Native people in what is now the United States have been resisting the takings of their lands by Euro-American settlers since the beginning of colonization. Despite their valiant efforts, “between 1776 and 1887, the United States seized over 1.5 billion acres from America’s Indigenous people by treaty and executive order” (Saunt 2014). 100 million more acres of tribal lands were lost as a result of the General Allotment Act (Dawes Act) passed in 1887 (Getches, et. al. 2011, 343). Since 1887, United States theft of Indigenous American lands has taken the forms of checkerboarded reservations, federal leasing of Indian trust lands, completion of infrastructure projects on or near Indigenous lands without consent, and more. Even supposedly treaty-guaranteed reservation lands are not immune to intrusion by non-Native forces.

Being non-Native myself, it is difficult to put into words just how important land is to Indigenous peoples. It is so much more than property – as it is in the eyes of Euro-American colonizers. It is sacred. It is their religious sites, the graves of their ancestors, it holds the knowledge of their languages, cultures, and more. Land is so critical to the identities of Indigenous peoples that the United Nations generally understands Indigenous to mean people who have a “strong link to territories and surrounding natural resources” (United Nations n.d.). For many Indigenous peoples, land is at the very heart of who they are.

Because of the centrality of land to Indigenous peoples, regaining possession of their lands is a principal front in modern Indigenous rights movements: “The native struggle in North America today can only be properly understood as a pursuit of the recovery of land rights which are guaranteed through treaties” (LaDuke 2002, 12). Federal Indian law and policy is a main arena for this fight. The United States has subjected its Indigenous peoples to their legal system “without their consent” (Dunbar-Ortiz & Gilio-Whitaker 2016, 45). This legal system has granted U.S. courts the authority to interpret treaties and laws about Indigenous peoples, and the U.S. Congress plenary power over Indian affairs. One cannot examine Native American efforts to get their land back without examining how this struggle has played out in the U.S. courts and Congress.

I have chosen 1946 as the start date for this Smithsonian Learning Lab collection because this was the year the Indian Claims Commission Act became law. As you will see in this collection’s annotations, the Indian Claims Commission had very mixed results for Native peoples as they fought for their lands. Still, I would argue that the Indian Claims process galvanized modern legal action by Indigenous peoples for their lands. Almost every federally recognized tribe filed one or more claims under the act (Lieder & Page 1997, 89).

With the cases I selected for inclusion in this collection, I aim to demonstrate the variety of different ways Indigenous peoples are using the legal system the U.S. has imposed on them – within or outside of the Indian Claims Commission – to attempt to regain possession of and control over their lands. The court cases and congressional acts in this collection are as follows, presented in chronological order:

1. 1946 – Indian Claims Commission Act
2. 1970 – Taos Pueblo Blue Lake Bill
3. 1971 – Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
4. 1980 – The Passamaquoddy, The Penobscot, and The Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act
5. 1980 – United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians
6. 1985 – United States v. Dann
7. 1985 – Oneida II – County of Oneida v. Oneida Indian Nation
8. 1990 – Puyallup Land Claims Settlement
9. 2009 – The Cobell Settlement
10. 2020 – McGirt v. Oklahoma

Whole books have been written about each of the cases I present in this collection. While I will not be able to capture the complexity of each and all the players, Native and non-Native, who contributed to the outcomes, I hope to convey the essence of these cases, the importance of each for the tribe(s) involved, and their significance in Indian land claims law for how each have hindered or advanced the cause of Native Americans recovering their stolen lands.

References

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne and Dina Gilio-Whitaker. 2016. “All the Real Indians Died Off”: And 20 Other Myths about Native Americans. Boston: Beacon Press.

Getches, David H., Charles Wilkinson, Robert Williams, Jr., and Matthew Fletcher. 2011. Cases and Materials on Federal Indian Law, 6th Edition. St. Paul, MN: West.

LaDuke, Winona. 2002. “Preface – Succeeding into Native North America: A Secessionist View.” In Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization by Ward Churchill, 11-13. San Francisco: City Lights.

Lieder, Michael and Jake Page. 1997. Wild Justice: The People of Geronimo vs. the United States. New York: Random House.

Saunt, Claudio. 2014. “Invasion of America: How the United States Took over an Eighth of the Wordl.” eHistory.org interactive map. Accessed April 18, 2021. https://usg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=eb6ca76e008543a89349ff2517db47e6. See also: https://youtu.be/pJxrTzfG2bo for animated map.

United Nations. N.d. “Factsheet: Who are indigenous peoples?” United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Accessed April 25, 2021. https://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/documents/5session_factsheet1.pdf.