We Are the Land by Damon B. Akins

Author:Damon B. Akins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520280496
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 16. Two Yokuts men on horseback, Tule River Indian Reservation, near Porterville, California, ca. 1900, created by C. C. Pierce. Photo courtesy Huntington Library.

South of the Tehachapi and San Gabriel Mountains, irrigation work followed rivers inland from the coast. Indigenous work similarly rendered ambivalent results. Irrigation projects provided a steady source of income through wages, while often simultaneously limiting Indigenous People’s access to the water vital to agricultural pursuits. In the late 1880s, private land and water companies claimed water rights and began to construct dams and flumes across San Diego County. Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside Counties followed. The federal government left protecting Indian water rights to the Indians themselves.

By the 1880s, settler violence shifted from overt assaults on Indigenous bodies—by this we mean statements of genocidal intent, state-sponsored body-part bounties, and militia and United States Army massacres—to assaults on Indigenous People’s relationships with land, water, and culture. The federal government’s trust relationship with Indigenous People collapsed. The trust relationship consisted of two principles: the federal government’s plenary or absolute power over Indian affairs, which derived from its responsibility to protect Indian land and people. Power was lashed to the responsibility to protect, the second principle. But rather than targeting the threats posed by local governments, White settlers, and trespassers, Congress often trained its plenary power against Indian sovereignty itself. This was not the protection Indians demanded.

Nationally, the federal government reasserted its plenary power over Indian sovereignty in the 1885 Major Crimes Act, which made it an exclusively federal crime for an Indian to commit murder, manslaughter, rape, assault with intent to kill, arson, burglary, or larceny against another Indian on a reservation. The Supreme Court of the United States reaffirmed the plenary power doctrine in a case that began on a California reservation. In 1886, the case of United States v. Kagama tested the Major Crimes Act, a response to a Supreme Court decision, which overturned the conviction of Crow Dog, a Lakota, for the murder of Spotted Tail, another Lakota, on the Great Sioux Reservation. Kagama killed Iyouse, both Yuroks, near the Hoopa Valley Reservation’s boundaries. The federal government prosecuted the case as a test case of the law’s constitutionality. The Supreme Court’s decision reinforced the wardship of Indian tribes, calling them “communities dependent on the United States. Dependent largely for their daily food. Dependent for their political rights.” The Court reasserted the necessity of federal preeminence in relations with Indigenous People. While the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of federal jurisdiction, the trial determined that the murder occurred just beyond the reservation’s boundaries. The federal government, therefore, lacked jurisdiction. The state prosecutor refused to prosecute and released Kagama.

In legal terms, the decision’s significance served as the justification and foundation for taking sovereign rights from Indigenous People and nations. By reasserting the necessity of the plenary power of the federal government, the Supreme Court cemented the wardship status of Indians. Kagama also introduced a false binary: Indian crime must fall under either federal or state jurisdiction.

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