Indian Treaties Research Articles

Commentary on “Adhesion to Canadian Indian Treaties and the Lubicon Lake Dispute”

Thomas Flanagan's article on adhesion to Indian treaties in this issue of the Canadian Journal of Law and Society is a bold foray into a virtually unexplored area of aboriginal rights. Although adhesions to most of the eleven Numbered Treaties in northern and western Canada were common, as Flanagan points out, not much attention has been paid to them. The matter is nonetheless of major importance for many aboriginal peoples, as was demonstrated by the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada last year that the Teme-Augama Anishnabai had surrendered their aboriginal title by adhesion to the 1850 Robinson-Huron Treaty. There can be little doubt that the issue is going to arise more frequently as other aboriginal peoples challenge the application of treaties to their ancestral lands.

Adhesion to Canadian Indian Treaties and the Lubicon Lake Dispute

AbstractResearch shows that adhesions to the numbered treaties were of two types: “internal” and “external.” In an internal adhesion, a band living within the previously ceded area agreed to the terms of the treaty, and no new transfer of land was involved. In an external adhesion, a band living outside the previously ceded area agreed to the terms of the treaty, thus adding a previously unceded piece of territory to the treaty area.This distinction is essential to understanding the long-running Lubicon Lake dispute. From the federal government's point of view, all of northern Alberta was ceded in Treaty Eight; so the Lubicons, who live within this area, are entitled to make only an internal adhesion. In contrast, the Lubicons claim to live on unceded land and thus demand to make an external adhesion. Their claim to possess unextinguished aboriginal title to a specific tract of land is used to justify demands for compensation that would not be paid in the case of an internal adhesion.

Fort Miller, California, 1851-1865

Contents: The California Indian treaties - The Yokuts and the Camp Barbour Treaty - Construction of Fort Miller - The Town of Millerton Expedition against the Yosemite Indians, 1852 - Tule River War, 1856 - Civil War years - Camp Babbitt and Visalia, California - The final years.

Rifle, Blanket and Kettle: Selected Indian Treaties and Laws

Rifle, Blanket and Kettle: Selected Indian Treaties and Laws

History and Method of Indian Allotment Surveys

Federal land surveys were mandated by Indian treaties, executive orders, and acts of Congress to expedite the allotment of Indian reservations. Congressional funding for these surveys seldom equaled the costs of the task. Various federal agencies were responsible for establishing allotment boundaries. The three‐mile method was the technique developed to subdivide a section, with monuments established at equidistant points on a line instead of at intersections with perpendicular lines, as public‐land surveys require. This reduced survey mileage and costs. Also, Indian allotment corners were set by the federal surveyor, rather than protracting the section subdivision on the plat and leaving monumentation to private surveyors hired by the land claimant. Only on exterior section boundaries are the allotment corners in the same position as their counterpart aliquot‐part corners. Problems arise when modern resurveys ignore, or do not discover, existing three‐mile method surveys, and sections are resubdivided by...

Congressional Abrogation of Indian Treaties: Reevaluation and Reform

Congressional Abrogation of Indian Treaties: Reevaluation and Reform

Early American Indian Documents, Treaties, and Laws

Early American Indian Documents, Treaties, and Laws

The Lummi Indians and the Canadian/American Pacific Salmon Treaty

N MARCH OF 1985 AT A CEREMONY in Ottawa, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and United States President Ronald Reagan signed a new treaty designed to allocate Pacific Ocean salmon' stocks between the two countries. The United States and Canada have had a limited salmon treaty in effect for nearly 50 years but this new treaty will specifically allocate the number of salmon based on the country of origin. Unlike the other states (Alaska, Oregon and California) and province (British Columbia) affected by the treaty, Washington State is subject to a 1974 Federal Court decision guaranteeing Treaty Indians 50 percent of the allowable salmon harvest. The new Pacific Salmon Treaty promises to modify the harvest of some of these Indian tribesespecially the Lummi Tribe. This paper seeks to explore the probable impact of the Pacific Salmon Treaty on the Lummi Indian community2 and the manner in which the Lummi have reacted to the international agreement. The Lummi had no input into the negotiation process and available information suggests that just as the Lummi have built their fleet to the point where they can harvest the Indian share of the allocation under the old treaty, they must now cut back their increasing harvest of Fraser River sockeye and pinks. The Lummi have reacted in opposition to the constraints imposed by the Pacific Salmon Treaty. The perception seems to be that the treaty imposes unfair harvest restrictions on the Indian fishers and therefore the opportunity to continue to increase harvest is jeopardized. The Lummi case points out a serious conflict that exists concerning the federal government's conception of international treaties. It has long been conceded that treaties between the United States and Indian tribes are the Supreme Law of the Land, and as such the tribes are not subject to the sovereignty of the individual states (Cohen 1942: 117). But how do Indian treaties fare when stacked up against a treaty with a foreign nation? The Canadian/American Pacific Salmon Treaty did not take into account the probable impact on the treaty-assured Indian fishing rights of Western Washington, but was primarily concerned with facilitating more effective management of the several salmon stocks that cross the international ocean boundaries during annual migration.

The Indians in American Society: From the Revolutionary War to the Present

List of Illustrations Preface Abbreviations Used in Footnotes Introduction: The Anomaly of Indian Treaties PART ONE. A TREATY SYSTEM 1. The Revolutionary War Years 2. Treaties of Peace after the Revolution 3. Treaty-Making Procedures under the Constitution 4. Confirming the Procedures: Other Treaties in the 1790s PART TWO. INSTRUMENTS OF FEDERAL POLICY 5. Testing the Treaty System: 1800 to the War of 1812 6. A Position of Dominance: The War of 1812 and After 7. Indian Removal and the Debate about Treaty Making 8. The Removal Period in the North 9. Patterns in Treaty Making 10. Treaties in the Expanding West 11. The Civil War Decade PART THREE. DETERIORATION 12. The End of Treaty Making 13. Treaty Substitutes 14. The Collapse of the Treaty System PART FOUR. RENEWAL: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 15. Treaties in the New Century 16. Treaties before the Supreme Court 17. Treaty-Rights Activism Appendices Index Picture Credits

Conservation and the abrogation of hunting rights in U.S./Indian treaties

Conservation and the abrogation of hunting rights in U.S./Indian treaties

Anti‐Indian Agitation and Economic Interests*

Throughout the United States in recent years there has been a resurgence of racist activity in many forms. In states with significant Indian populations and landholdings or land claims Indians have been the target of well-financed campaigns of propagandizing and lobbying. In 26 states organizations have been formed to work at the state and national levels against Indian rights. The state groups, such as Montanans Opposed to Discrimination, organized in 1974, and Wyoming Citizens for Equality in Government, are amalgams of smaller, special-interest organizations, each with its own program for abrogating Indian treaties and federal trust protection of reservations.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Ethical Issues in Resource Economics: Discussion

Burness has touched on a very vexing problem, one that has the potential for disrupting property rights in water, water use, and efficient allocation of water over large areas of the West. reason is that Indian claims being made for water are massive in many areas, and the courts and water administrators have just begun to take the first tentative steps in dealing with this issue. First we should ask: What is equity? To or for whom? Rawls' Theory of Justice outlines several criteria for attaining equity and social justice. He believes basic rights should be distributed equally to all citizens, but social and economic inequalities are to be skewed in favor of the least advantaged. In our study of irrigation communities we found that farmers preferred merit or hard work as a basis for economic inequality (Maass and Anderson, p. 394). U.S. government is supposed to have a trust relationship with the Indians, but is it to act vigorously on the part of Indians against other citizens of the United States? I am not sure the Indians can expect this. When one examines any of the Indian claims for water, one finds the statement that Indian water rights were implied at the time of the treaty or establishment of the reservation, but nowhere is there an explicit statement claiming water rights. Irrigation was not generally practiced in the West at that time, and there is no evidence that the treaty makers had water development in mind. During and after this period, the federal government began to admit western states into the Union. All seventeen arid and semiarid states adopted the Appropriation Doctrine of water rights. constitutions of these states make explicit statements such as: The waters of the streams belong to the (Wyoming doctrine), or The waters of the streams belong to the public (Colorado doctrine) (Huffman, pp. 44-45). Webb (p. 432) noted that more efficient use of resources could have been made if the federal government had retained control of water as it had land, but administration and control of water rights passed by default to the states. Under this system many streams in the West have long been overappropriated. Only the Colorado River, the Yampa River, and the White River have unappropriated water in Colorado. Now in the 1970s and 1980s the federal government is trying to reestablish control that it let go by default a century ago. Indian water rights claims have been raised seriously only in the recent past. Winters decision granted Indian water rights on a small stream in Montana in 1907. Under this decision the Indians were seemingly granted some unspecified quantity of water for irrigation of reservation lands. Over fifty years passed with no ripple of Indian rights on the western water scene. Then, in the Arizona v. California lawsuit over division of the water of the lower Colorado River, the special master brought Indian water claims to the forefront by granting unprecedented amounts of water to desert lands within reservation boundaries. Since that time, tribes all over the West have been encouraged to get into the act of claiming their water. great bulk of the claims are based on implied rights to water based on Indian treaties or establishment of reservations. treaties, however, say nothing about water, water rights, or irrigation. treaties were made with nomadic, pastoral, and hunting aboriginal tribes that had little or no governmental structure. creative attorneys who are pushing Indian water right claims have elevated these claims to encompass large quantities of water on some streams and have orchestrated uses such as irrigation, industrial uses, power generation, instream flow maintenance, and the right to sell water to industries off the reservations. Hutchins wrote a threevolume work containing 1,950 pages in which Raymond L. Anderson is with the Department of Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics, Colorado State University. views expressed in this paper are those of the discussant and do not represent the views of any agency or institution.

Double Deception: Lester Hargrett and His Indian Treaties

Double Deception: Lester Hargrett and His Indian Treaties

THE BOLDT DECISION

In 1974 Federal District Judge H. Boldt mandated that 50% of the salmon resource of Washington State be allocated to Indian treaty tribes. His decision produced what has been characterized as “except for some desegregation cases … the most concerted official and private efforts to frustrate a decree of a federal court witnessed in this century.” This article argues that fishing rights litigation has played a significant role in defining and structuring the conflict over the salmon resource. An unanticipated or unavoidable “side effect” of the successful tribal litigation strategy is the restructuring of the conflict in a way that is likely ultimately to prove as detrimental as outright legal defeat. Focusing on the Indian fishing rights issue, the article also studies the use of litigation as a weapon for social change. The underlying assumption is that a legal order that denies impoverished and powerless constituents a meaningful avenue for social change is gravely flawed.

Interview With Nilo Cayuquo

Nilo Cayuqueo, a Mapuche Indian from Argentina, is a coordinator of the Consejo Indio de Sud América (CISA), a communications center headquartered in Lima, Peru, representing native peoples from ten South American countries. He has been an active participant in international treaty conferences, including a U.N. nongovernmental organization conference held in Geneva during the autumn of 1981. The collective of coordinating editors of Latin American Perspectives spent part of an afternoon this past spring talking with Cayuqueo. As in the following interview, discussion ranged from specific indigenous struggles to the general strategies of indigenismo and especially the relation of Marxism and class struggle to the indigenista movement. The following interview was made by Zoltán Grossman, a Wisconsin environmental activist, who was an international organizer for the 1980 Black Hills Survival Gathering. The interview was conducted June 10, 1981, at the Seventh International Indian Treaty Conference at White Earth, Minnesota. Translating at the interview was Jo Tucker of the Guatemala News and Information Bureau in Berkeley, California.

Academic Freedom and the Power of the Guild

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Anti-Indian Agitation and Economic Interests

Throughout the United States in recent years there has been a resurgence of racist activity in many forms. In states with significant Indian populations and landholdings or land claims Indians have been the target of well-financed campaigns of propagandizing and lobbying. In 26 states organizations have been formed to work at the state and national levels against Indian rights. The state groups, such as Montanans Opposed to Discrimination, organized in 1974, and Wyoming Citizens for Equality in Government, are amalgams of smaller, special-interest organizations, each with its own program for abrogating Indian treaties and federal trust protection of reservations.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

The Spirit of the Alberta Indian Treaties

The Spirit of the Alberta Indian Treaties

Conquest, Capitulation, and Indian Treaties

THE PROBLEM BEGINS WITH A QUESTION relating to Indian treaties. The question was posed some time ago by my colleague Robert Berkhofer in the course of a conversation on the varieties of European colonization in North and South America. Did the Spaniards ever make treaties with Indians? We knew that in North America the English and the French made treaties with Indians. The Dutch did so in the Hudson Valley. The Portuguese made treaties with the natives of Brazil. But why did we seem to lack evidence for Spanish treaties with Indians? And if indeed Spaniards did not make such treaties, how and when did the tradition of Indian treaty-making come to be established in this hemisphere? The question was the more intriguing because at the University of Michigan we place a special value on historical comparison. We once conducted a program precisely on comparative colonization in the Americas, identifying and contrasting the points of difference among the colonizing nations. Mr. Berkhofer's question concerning Indian treaties thus struck a familiar chord, though it concerned a subject that had been quite overlooked in our previous investigation. By way of response, I could recall some ad hoc alliances that Spaniards had made with Indians, as well as some loose oral agreements, promises of reward, and the like. Long ago I made a study of one of these supposed agreements, between Fernando Cortes and the natives of the province of Tlaxcala in Mexico, concluding that the matter had been much exaggerated, especially by the Tlaxcalan Indians themselves, who stood to benefit from the exaggeration in various ways.' But even if the Tlaxcalan example could

Conquest, Capitulation, and Indian Treaties

Conquest, Capitulation, and Indian Treaties