1973: “If they had a squabble with Indians and the whites won, it was a great victory,” said Mon-gon-za of the Miami tribe of Indiana. “But if the Indians won, it was a massacre.”

American Indian is Finding More
Sympathetic Ear in Modern America

by Donald Finley 

Part 3 of 3 in a Series 

1973 Aug 1 Lebanon Daily News 

      Washington - Chiefs of the Delaware Tribe of Indians sat down with government agents in Washington on May 6, 1854, to sign a treaty ceding more than 550,000 acres of tribal lands in Kansas to the United States. 

            The treaty required the government to sell the land at public auction and turn the proceeds over to the Delawares.

      But the United States did not keep that treaty promise. Instead of auctioning the land, the tract was appraised and sold at the appraised value of about $2 an acre. 

      Redress was more than 100 years in coming. The government’s Indian Claims Commission ICC ruled in 1969 that the United States must make things right for the Delaware Tribe.

      The ICC ruled that the land was worth $5 an acre in 1854, not $2 an acre, and should have been sold for $2.5 million instead of the $1.058 million it fetched.

      The commission said that not only did the government owe the Delawares the difference of $1.4 million, but also an additional $7.8 million in non-compounded interest of 5 percent a year for 115 years.

      The Delaware case is one of numerous examples in the nation’s nearly 200-year history of government violation of Indian treaties or agreements, or of laws dealing with Indians. As Indians sometimes say, “White man speak with forked tongue.”

      The United States signed 371 treaties with various Indian tribes and nations from the Revolutionary War until 1871, when Congress voted to end bilateral treaty-making with Indians and deal with them instead unilaterally through regular laws and statutes.

      Indian spokesmen contend that the United States broke almost every one of those 37 treaties, or else cheated the Indians out of fair compensation for lands ceded under the treaties.

      For decades, Indians were barred from seeking redress in the courts, but in 1946 Congress set up the Indian Claims Commission to hear grievances accruing before that date. Since that time there has been a surge of Indian claims, not only before the ICC but also in state and federal courts and before the nation’s legislative bodies.

      Recent militancy by some Indians, evidenced in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington last year and the occupation of Wounded Knee, SD, this year, has trained a spotlight on Indian claims of grievance against past sins of the white man.

      And, increasingly, the red man is finding more sympathetic ears in modern America then he did in the last century when often he was at war with the whites.

      Indian claims have developed into a highly specialized branch of law, and a complicated and unique set of standards has developed in what is known as Federal Indian Law.

      One of the basic principles is that Congress can abrogate an Indian treaty unilaterally just as it can a treaty with a foreign nation, or it can violate it with subsequent legislation. But if the government takes Indian lands other than in war, it must give adequate compensation.

      And Federal Indian Law recognizes that the government has a “special relationship” and acts as a trustee over Indians and their property, with Indians in effect being special wards of the federal government.

      Consequently, most Indian claims involving land do not ask for the land back, but only fair compensation for it. Most of the others involve fishing, hunting and water rights on Indian reservations.

      The first Indian treaty the revolutionary government signed also was the Delawares, at Ft Pitt, Kan., on Sept 17, 1778. In return for government guarantees about their tribal territory, the Delawares agreed to help the Americans fight the British at a time when most Indian tribes sided with the Crown.

      A total of 21 treaties were signed with the Delawares, who eventually were moved into Kansas under the 1830 Indian Removal Act that transferred – often by force – most Indians living eat of the Mississippi River to new Indian territory guaranteed to them west of the river.

      The final Indian treaty was signed in Washington Aug 13, 1868 with the Nez Perces tribe. It amended an earlier treaty and provided for allotment of the tribal reservation now in Idaho into individual plots for each adult member of the tribe.

      Hundreds of Indian claims have been filed over the years, and many still are pending. Tribes and individual Indians operating under their “special relationship” to the federal government, seek to right wrongs allegedly done them by whites and the white man’s government.

      The ICC’s award to the Delawares in 1969 was one of a series of rulings involving similar cases of Indian land cessions in Kansas and Nebraska in 1854 in which the government said it would auction the land, but did not.

      In the first of these, the ICC ruled the government still owed the Peoria Indians, $173,000 on 207,000 acres in Kansas, but did not award any interest to the money. On appeal by the Peorias, the Supreme Court ordered interest paid, which later was set at $960,000 based on 5 percent interest per year, not compounded.

      The established a precedent that the government must pay interest on Indian money it holds in trust or money it illegally withholds from Indians. But monetary settlements on land claims still are made on the basis of what the land was worth at the time it was taken from the Indians, with no interest or allowance for subsequent increases in the value of the land.

      Joe Carrillo, head of California Indians for a Fair Settlement, recently returned to President Nixon a government check for $10,696.76 representing a payment of 47 cents an acre for more than 65 million acres of Indian lands in California.

      “Payment of 47 cents an acre is totally inadequate,” Carrillo told the President, “In that it does not include damages for more than 100,000 ancestors killed during the Gold Rush, nor for gold, oil and other minerals, water rights or even the true value of the land taken.”

      While land claims asking for adequate compensation do not threaten the present white owners of the property, the same is not true of a key Indian claim now pending before the Supreme Court involving water rights on the Paiute Indians’ Pyramid Lake. 

      The Paiutes are a fishing tribe. But in 1906 the government began building the Newlands Reclamation Project upriver. The amount of water allowed to spill over the project’s diversion dam was not enough to maintain the normal level of Pyramid Lake, and the fishing and resort potential was damaged in the lake that is the Paiutes’ major resource.

      A federal judge ruled that more water must be allowed to pour downstream into Pyramid Lake, but ranchers upstream claim they cannot operate if they have to give up more water. If the Supreme Court upholds the ruling, water supplies for Reno and other communities upstream in Nevada and California also could be threatened.

      In a similar suit involving the Rincon and LaJolla band of Mission tribes near President Nixon’s Western White House at San Clemente, Calif., the Indian reservation has a suit pending against the city of Escondido and the United States, claiming the federal government has not protected Indian rights to the water on the reservation.

      Fishing and hunting rights also are frequent subjects of Indian claims. Basically, they resolve around the questions of whether Indians must follow state wildlife conservation rules on reservations and whether non-Indians can hunt and fish on Indian lands.

      In one case, an Indian tribal game warden found three non-Indians hunting without permits on the Fort Yuma Reservation in California. The non-Indians complained to the Imperial County Sheriff, who then arrested the Indian game warden. But in October, a federal judge ruled in favor of the Indians.

      One of the best known cases involved the Leech Lake Band of Chippewa Indians in Minnesota, who filed a suit in federal court in 1969 seeking to establish that their members were exempt from state game and fish laws on the reservation, and that the band had exclusive rights to control hunting and fishing of Indians and non-Indians on the reservation.

      The federal government supported the Chippewas in their case against the State of Minnesota. U.S. District Judge Edward J. Devitt ruled in 1971 that the Indians were exempt from the state game and fish laws on the reservation, but denied them exclusive control of the area, which contains an extensive resort community controlled by whites.

      While an appeal was pending, the state and the Indians negotiated an agreement which barred the Chippewas from commercial taking of game and game fish but permitted them to take fish and game for their own consumption under rules set down and enforced by a Reservation Conservation Committee established by the Indians.

      The agreement also provided for the Indians to issue special licenses for non-Indians to hunt and fish on the reservation, with the state selling the licenses and turning the proceeds over to the tribe.

      This agreement between Minnesota and the Leech Lake Indians was ratified by the state legislature this year, but the state is keeping open its options of appealing Devitt’s ruling if the agreement does not work out.

      There has been some improvement for reservation Indians under President Nixon’s administration. For instance, in a reversal of the long government policy of taking land away from the Indians, Nixon in late 1970 signed legislation to return 48,000 acres of sacred land near Blue Lake, NM, to the Taos Indians. It was taken from them in 1906 and made into a national forest.

      That is quite a bit different, said Chief Mon-gon-za of the Miami tribe of Indiana the state named for Indians, than when President George Washington in one of his first official acts organized militia or troops to accompany settlers into lands given earlier to Indians by treaty.

      “If they had a squabble with Indians and the whites won, it was a great victory,” said Mon-gon-za. “But if the Indians won, it was a massacre.” 

1973 Aug 1 Lebanon Daily News