THE SACRAMENTO BEE Sunday, June 17, 1973

Militancy At Hand?

By John V. Hurst

Bee Staff Writer

"Dear Gov. Reagan," the letter begins.

"Just received my $668 for my share of the Calif. land claim (Indian). Understand this was payed off at 47 cents an acre.

"Find enclosed 94 cents. Would like to buy back two acres of land. Don't have to be anything special city dump, Mojave desert, anyplace. Thank you."

The letter, with postal money order enclosed, is signed by a member of the Hoopa Indian Nation who lives in Humptulips, Wash.

He is not holding his breath for

The list of grievances tices" the Indians call them - goes beyond land to include a host of other problems: Health and health care, ed. ucation, social and job discrimination, housing, welfare even, in a sense, citizenship.

The problems are most acute for the Indian who is unwilling or unable to embrace the system and its values. His alternative is life as a kind of urban or reservation outcast: A virtual welfare case with little if any say over his own fate.

For behind the problems is official US insistence that the Indian either "make it" on white terms or suffer the treatment society reserves for its "losers."

It is an insistence which can be traced through the history of USIndian relations, beginning in 1887 when Congress delegated the president's treaty-making powers to the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). This law also provided for the sale of "surplus

Indian lands, and within the next quarter-century the BIA disposed of some 90 million of the 135 million acres then in Indian hands. The history includes Congress' 1953 declaration, made at California's See Back Page, A20, Col. 1

Obligation

Far from it, Nixon stated. "The special relationship between Indians and the federal government," he told the Congress, "is the result of solemn obligations which have been entered into by the United States govern

ment.

"Down through the years, through written treaties and through a formal and informal agreement, our government has made specific commitments to the Indian people.

"For their part, the Indians have often surrendered claims to vast tracts of land and have accepted life on reservations in exchange for government-provided services such as health, education and public safety."

Nixon declared that white Americans have "oppressed and brutalized Indians, deprived them of their ancestral lands and denied them the opportunity to control their own destiny." He called the record one of "frequent aggression, broken agreements, internment, remorse and prolonged failure."

It is also a record on which Nixon's plea, seemingly, has had scant effect.

In fact, to people like Ross Morres, executive director of Nevada's Indian Affairs Commission, it sounds like a record with its needle stuck in the same groove.

"The 37th President of the United States has spoken," says Morres, "as have the 36 presidents before him.

"Thirty-nine secretaries of the interior have appointed 40 commissioners of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who have traveled the land learning the problems' - then waited until the next president appointed a new secretary to appoint his new commissioner... to once again learn about the Indian problems."

"Demonstrations are the only way we have to let the public know the laIdian is still being mistreated," said one member of the activist American Indian Movement (AIM) after the aborted Sutter's Fort attempt last March.

"The people who are supposed to help us with our problems don't want our problems solved. They're living off our problems."

AIM'S militant methods are deplored - even denounced - by others among the confusing array of Indian spokesmen, many of whom the younger, impatient Indians call the "Uncle Tomahawks" of an Indian establishment tamed by the BIA.

Quest For Priority

Less criticism is heard, however, of the goals that lie behind the militance; and here one senses a kind of tacit hope: That perhaps violence will move the Indians' plight higher on the list of national priorities, the way Watts did for blacks.

It could be a movement whose time has come.

Only this spring, a Harris poll confirmed that three out of every four Ainericans believe the Indians have not been treated well in this country. Two out of three agreed that the Indians have been mistreated by the BLA.

Tomorrow: What makes California a special case.

L

SACRAMENTO BEE

June 18, 1973

By John V. Hurst

Bee Staff Writer

roughly one-fourth the estimated 850,000 the US still counts as Indians today.

"The census was completely wrong," says H. D. Timm Williams, director of Gov. Ronald Reagan's Indian Assistance Project office.

"There are 96,000 California Indians who registered for the land claims settlement.

Many In LA

"And this doesn't include the urban Indians. Some estimates have as many as 80,000 of these living in the Los Angeles area, and another 40,000 in the Bay area. Many of them have Spanish surnames or were not identified as Indian because they saw no reason to say they were."

The US Bureau of Indian Affairs once reported that more than half of all the Indians in its nationwide "relocation program one of several schemes aimed at getting Indians off the reservations and into the system -chose to resettle in California.

Besides the problems common to most American Indians, California's have some uncommon problems as well. For while most of US-Indian history is one of broken treaties, in the special case of California it is a histo

Greed Motive

In 1852, however, an official California delegation prevailed on the US Senate to pigeonhole these treaties. The reason? Gold might be found on the Indians' land.

The treaties then disappeared, to turn up again as historical curiosities in the early 1900s. By then, much of the designated California Indian land had been expropriated by whites, usually under force of law and frequently by just plain force.

"No treaties were ever ratitifed by the United States," California's now-defunct State Advisory Commission on Indian Affairs (SACIA) said in its final report, in 1969. "No appreciable land base was ever authorized for Indian tribes and bands of the state."

Edward F. Beale, who became California's superintendent of Indian affairs in 1852, did what he could to save what he could, however. He fathered the system of reservations and rancherias which does exist in the state about 500,000 acres in all. The SACIA report notes the reservations "were established and held in protective trust by the federal govcrnment...

"Rancherias were later purchased

at intervals for a few homeless and landless' Indians in California. These were also held in protective trust by the United States.

"The rancheria system is unique to

California, and these generally isolated small acreages provide little other than homesites, which are often without water or sanitary facilities.

"The majority of (California's) Indians received no land base at all."

Unforeseen Problems

At one time there were 112 rancherias in the state. There are 74 left. The rest were deeded, in parcels, to individual Indians by the BIA. Many of the new "owners" were unaware they would have to pay taxes and go into hock to conform to water, samitary and building codes -or that they might be disinheriting their chil dren, as BIA-recognized Indians, by accepting "tel...ated" status for themselves.

The BIA says "some 62 distinct tribes are known to have lived in or wandered through what is now California at some time in the past." State archeological experts say 51 tribes, speaking 103 different dialects, lived in California as of 1770. The treaties of 1851-52 name a total of 131 bands and tribes.

But of the 105 tribes native to the original 48 states the ones listed as "major" by Encyclopedia Americana - California's are linked to perhaps a dozen or so: Chumash, Hupa. Karok, Klamath, Luiseno, Maidu, Modoc. Paiute, Pomo, Shoshoni and Wintun. To explam how California's legislature could seriously send an official delegation to Washington, one whose sole aim was to keep the state's Indians in a landless limbo, consider a couple of seldom-mentioned items of early California history:

-An 1850 law permitted any white Californian to "buy" an Indian

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from jail or other custody, retaining state-certified ownership of that Indian until he was 18 or she was 15.

-But in 1860 the legislature had second thoughts. It amended the 1850 law to raise the indentured age to 30 for males, 25 for females. This updated slavery act also provided that no white Californian could be convicted of any crime solely on the testimony of an Indian.

Ambivalent Policy

"Over the years," says the SACIA report, "governmental policies and

attitudes have been markedly ambiv alent consistent only in their inconsistency.

"In the early 1950s, however, there developed what appears to have been a concerted effort to terminate the

special relationship between the Indians and the federal government, especially in California."

The reference is to the 1953 resolution, passed at the behest of Califor nia's legislature, which "declared it to be the policy of Congress to end the status of American Indians as wards of the federal government, and to abolish all . . .(BIA) offices in California, Florida, New York and Texas

In California this defederalization was partially successful...."

The resolution led to passage that same year of the hated Public Law 280, which conferred on the separate states legal jurisdiction over Indians.

Yet the BIA has remained in California, primarily to administer Indian trust properties mostly land - in the state. It also handles programs involving job assistance, housing, health and education grants for Indians, "with" -in its own words "complete assimilation of the Indian people into the economic, social and political life of the state as its ultimate objective."

In 1968, Congress appropriated $29.1 million as payment, at 47 cents an acre, for some 62 million acres of

the lost lands. The still-disputed settlement. climaxing more than 100 years of litigation, is based on what the experts say the land was worth in 1852-53.

Even un the existing "thisor-nothing" basis, many California Indians have refused to accept their shares in this settlement.

"Not only are 95 per cent of all California Indians without land today," says lobbyist Joe Carrillo of Davis, citing a figure others believe is closer to 75 per cent. "but we suffer from the lowest economic and social conditions of any people in the State of Califor

nia.

Carrillo, whose California Indians for a Fair Settlement is contesting that disputed 47 cents an acre, says this in a letter he sent President Richard Nixon recently, returning $10,697 in settlement checks received by about 20 Indians.

"We are asking." he wrote. that the California Indian land claims case be opened in the United States Court of Claims so as to give land back to California Indians and to reach an honorable settlement. . .

"Forty-seven cents an acre is not 'just compensation' for land taken without consent."

Tomorrow: The mansion site controversy.

By John V. Hurst

Bee Staff Writer

With a rare fervor and even rarer unity, Califor nia's Indians oppose construction of a governor's mansion in Carmichael on a Maidu village and burial site that is perhaps 3,000 years old.

Nor are they happy about proposals for an archaelogical dig there in advance of construction.

Yet there are unmistakable signs that the Indians do not really expect to prevail on either point.

And there are rumblings that such activist groups as the American Indian Movement (AIM) might resort to an occupation of the site on the American River like the one at Wounded Knee. Yet when such an occupation was attempted last Easter, the tiny band of young militants was hustled away and jailed.

Symbol of Friction Whatever happens, the mansion site is fast becoming a symbol of much that is wrong between California's Indian population and the state's Establishment.

At the crux of things is the lingering conflict between the Indian concept of land as something that belongs to everybody, to be shared, and the prevailing view that it is something to be owned in separate pieces.

"Indians are historically place-oriented rather than job-oriented," explains the Nevada Indian Affairs Commission's eloquent 1972 report. "Their identity is tied to the land and to the water that rises from or flows across their land.

D-Sacramento, to introduce his SB 441. The bill propos. es spending $110,000 for an archaeological dig there, So something of the site's history can be preserved before the mansion construction destroys it.

Yet Indians object to the dig almost as much as to the mansion. Nor are they at all happy that the state's would-be souvenir hunters have been told, in effect, where to look anew for Indian artifacts.

Against Excavation "Indians don't want their ancestors' bones dug up," says Dan Andrade, director of the Mejel Indian Center in San Diego.

"I can't name any Indians," adds Margeret Hoagland of Ukiah, "that would go against their religion on this. We want our people to stay where they are, whether that's been for 200 or 2,000 years."

"A chief many years ago said that his home is where the bodies of his ancestors are," says national AIM leader Vernon Bellecourt in a current magazine interview. "That's where the spirits of our people are."

"I don't see why we can't let our ancestors rest in peace." says Stan Halfday of the Intertribal Council of California. Area 1, in Sacramento. "Let them lie where they lie."

Thus even the would-be activists are disposed to defer to the Maidus' wishes. And as yet the Maidus have taken no uncompromising. this-or-nothing stand. Nor has anyone found a way to get the estimated 2,000 Maidu together to seek such a consensus.

At a meeting attended by nearly 50 Indians last May 15, Marie Potts, 77, an Indian leader and the only Maidu speaker present, reluctantly indicated she chaeological digging at the would not object to arsite but only if all efforts failed in preventing construction of the mansion there.

Follow Suit And reluctantly. Indians of other tribes and bands

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who were present at the session convened by the governor's Indian Assistance Project - went along.

"("I lost my own great grandmother." says 1AP

Director H. D. Timm Williams of his own family's burial site. "because a university came and found her body and took it.")

But at a later session of the new Senate Ad Hoc Committee on Indian Affairs, the thrust of the antimansion movement underwent a shift in focus.

The 40 or so Indians left, of the 80-plus who had attended, met after the adhoc hearing and unanimously passed a resolution. It simply singled out the mansion site as an example, in urging a state law to protect all Indian burial grounds in California.

quire that the mansion be bill pass. built downtown.

But AB 1241 almost certainly faces the governor's veto because- and here is the catch to it all the site will revert to the nowdisbanded group which raised the funds to buy it. if no mansion is built there.

Thus it would return to private hands, facing possibly the same fate as the land just over the fence. A developer is covering possibly more Indian gravesites there with a posh, semirural subdivision.

Time Runs Out And the whole controversy is up against the clock. Construction is scheduled to start at the site next Oct. 1. The state's General Services Agency says it can hold back this money for the time needed to allow 3 dig, should Sen Rodda's

Bee Photo

But Indians would like to see the construction money taken out of the budget entirely, just to be sure.

"The earth is sacred to us, says a statement by the Contra Costa College Native American Student Ummon (NASU). "That it contains the remains of our ancestors makes it more so.

The NASU resolution, submitted at the ad-hoc hearing. urges that the mansion site be left undisturbed.

Poses question

"If you destroy the things we hold sacred, with the full knowledge of what you do," it says, "how then can you say to us that we should hold you and your laws in respect?"

Tomorrow: The governor and the militants.