The day after California was admitted to the Union in September 1850, John C. Frémont, a U.S. senator who had settled in California from Savannah, Georgia, submitted 10 bills to the U.S. Senate seeking to transfer millions of acres of Indian Land to the newly admitted state.
One of the bills that passed sought to dispossess California Indians by “providing for the extinction of their territorial claims in the gold mining districts.”
According to research done by historian Benjamin Madley, who wrote the award-winning book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, the bill opened the door to an all-out assault on California Indians. California Indians held title to these lands under the laws of Spain, the first country to colonize California. Frémont told his fellow senators, “The Spanish law clearly and absolutely secured to Indians fixed rights of property in the lands they occupy, beyond what is admitted by this Government in its relations with its own domestic tribes.” Nonetheless, the Senate agreed and passed the bill to divest California Indians of their land.
“Frémont was effectively acknowledging Native title, and that Native title had not been sundered under Spain or under Russia or under Mexico in their colonial regimes in California,” Madley told High Country News in an interview. At the time, he added, “legislators under U.S. rule were aware of this, and they are profoundly concerned about its legal ramifications.”
The solution was treaty-making.
Between 1851 and 1852, 119 representatives from tribes across California signed 18 treaties. They were promised 19 reservations, totaling about 7,488,000 acres, or 7.5% of California. But the U.S. Senate failed to ratify these treaties, so Congress provided only seven temporary military reservations totaling no more than 125,000 acres, with none of them larger than 25,000 acres. By the late 1860s, all but two of those reservations were abandoned.
Nearly 80 years later, Congress passed the California Indians Jurisdictional Act, which authorized California’s attorney general to sue the federal government in the U.S. Court of Claims on behalf of California Indian people to seek compensation for this land. Notably, it did not allow them to control the litigation or select their own attorneys.
Earl Warren, who later served as chief justice of the Supreme Court and delivered the majority opinion in Brown v. The Board of Education, argued on behalf of California Indian people in 1941 and 1942. The initial settlement in 1953 reportedly paid $150 each to roughly 33,000 individuals. The land was radically undervalued, and legal fees and offsets were deducted — expenses that the state of California said it had incurred to “care for the Indians.” Related legislation called the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946 allowed tribal nations in California and across the country to argue against the United States for land that was taken. However, the commission couldn’t return land, merely award money based on the land’s market value when it was taken.
IN A COURT CASE THAT DRAGGED on for nearly 30 years, California Indian families received payments between $600 and $700 dollars.
My family was one of them.
My grandmother, Anna Herrera (née Forsting), was born in 1921, a Salinan Indian, three years before the United States recognized Indigenous people as citizens on their own land. As a girl, she remembered her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, aunts and uncles living in a place called Toro Creek, a village tucked between what is now Atascadero and Morro Bay, on the central California coast — oak country, with a view of the mountains. She was still a teenager when the Marre Land and Cattle Company waged a yearslong campaign to evict them.
After my grandmother died, I found a letter among her things. It was addressed to “ALL CALIFORNIA INDIANS” and dated September 1972.
A group called California Indians for a Fair Settlement had invited my grandmother to a meeting to discuss the check the federal government was about to send her. The U.S. had agreed to pay California Indians $29.1 million for the land taken in 1853. Divided across the acreage, that came to 47 cents an acre. The letter reminded her that some of that land had gold and was valued at $20 an acre, while the timber and minerals were worth more still. “What do you think California Indian land is worth?” it asked.
I don’t know if my grandmother went to that meeting. She never talked about the letter, or the settlement, or the village her family was forced from.
To understand how California Indian land ends up worth less than the price of a stamp, you have to go back to treaties very few Californians grew up learning about.
Nearly a century ago, the Indigenous LandBack movement (recently gaining more attention as #LandBack) in California was born.
By allowing California Indian families the right to sue for land lost after the 18 unratified treaties, state leaders acknowledged the harm done. This was their chance to make things right.
IN MARCH 2026, A GLOWING press release from the California Natural Resources Agency celebrated a policy that aimed to bring 7.5 million acres back under the care of tribal nations.
The announcement declares that the “state’s first-ever Tribal Stewardship Policy establishes statewide framework for tribal access, collaboration, and ancestral land return.”
The California Natural Resources Agency says the acreage is representative of what the U.S. promised for reservations for California Indians under the 18 unratified treaties.
Over the last two years, more than 7.5 million acres have been part of California’s LandBack pledge. The Yurok Tribe in Northern California, the Washoe Tribe and the Southern Sierra Miwuk reclaimed land bordering on Yosemite National Park, one of the nation’s biggest outdoor attractions. The land was previously held by the Pacific Forest Trust nonprofit and not part of the national park.
The Yurok, the Washoe and the Klamath have stories of land return that are part of the growing #LandBack movement in Indian Country. Nearly a century ago in California, however, Native people filed a lawsuit to either have the land returned or be compensated fairly.
Neither of those things happened.
The California Indians Jurisdictional Act, passed in 1928, allowed lawsuits on behalf of “the Indians of California” — defined as everyone who could trace descent from someone living in the state on June 1, 1852 — seeking land they would have received under the 18 treaties.
The case became known by its docket number, K-344, a lawsuit that happened after the congressional act became law.
In 1937, a Government Accounting Office report detailed every dollar the state had ever spent “for the benefit of” California Indians between 1852 and 1932, including money for schools, hospitals and surveying reservations that were never created. California wanted that amount subtracted from any monetary compensation the federal government paid for land claims.
These “offsets” included everything from prosecution of kidnappers to Indian Commissioners’ pay to the cost of enrolling every California Indian on a 1928 list for compensation. California had a documented Indian child-kidnapping/indenture trade in the 1850s and ’60s, and this line item is the federal government’s own ledger entry for pursuing it. The proposed settlement was $17,816,624.48. The offsets to be deducted were $12,650,761.02, leaving the total settlement amount to be awarded $5,165,863.46.
Almost as an aside, the report notes that it did not count the money the U.S. reimbursed California for “suppressing and repelling Indian hostilities” — reimbursements, in other words, for the state militias that had been paid to hunt Native people. (That was a different ledger.)
By the time the case reached final hearings in San Francisco in 1955, it had become a fight over how to measure a people’s relationship to land. The government’s expert witnesses employed the so-called “ecological theory” — an argument that a tribe’s true territory could be calculated mathematically by mapping which ground supplied most of its food and treating the rest as secondary, less deserving of compensation. Some government witnesses put the figure at 90% of subsistence, derived from just 5% to 20% of a tribe’s claimed land. This argument reduced the amount of land California Indians owned, thereby shrinking the payout.
Anthropologists Alfred Kroeber and Robert Heizer picked that argument apart. When asked how much land Indigenous people in California owned, Kroeber replied, “All of it.” The three commissioners agreed, unanimously, rejecting the ecological theory in 1959. It would be another 13 years, in 1972, before letters like my grandmother’s went out to households across the state, asking people to decide whether 47 cents an acre was an acceptable amount.
When asked how much land Indigenous people in California owned, Kroeber replied, “All of it.”
IN THE 1960s, THE WASHINGTON D.C.-based Wilkinson, Cragun and Barker Law Firm held meetings throughout California to convince tribal leaders and tribal citizens to accept the settlement money, or else risk of further litigation and a shrinking payout.
Most California Indians did end up accepting it, but not without numerous complaints over why it was so low.
In one meeting held in Eureka in 1964, Michael Rogers, from Witchback Hoopa Valley Reservation, an authorized representative of the Klamath River, contested the amount.
“The real issue today is that these attorneys are here to ask you to sell the rest of the state of California for 47 cents. Now they state that 47 cents comes from the price of 1853,” he said. “Well, in 1853, if land was selling for 47 cents an acre, at that time gold was only worth $16 an ounce. Today, the price of gold is $35, and that 47 cents would be equal to $1 and a quarter, which Congress said that the Indians could sue for would be the limit.”
Eventually, the settlement stood and the California Indians’ lawyers convinced them to accept the offer. My grandmother, like tens of thousands of others, received her share — approximately $688. Her mother, Felista Forsting, her grandmother Maria Severiana Bailon, her uncles Jose Bailon and Ramon Roses, who were all part of the 1928 lawsuit and had their names on the judgement rolls, passed away and never received a penny.
Half a century later, the state has swapped the language of settlement for the language of stewardship. But the transaction still runs in one direction: California decides what to give back, when, and to whom — the same government that decided, in 1852, what to take. Some estimate Indigenous people lost more than 75 million acres in California.
But no initiatives, apologies or stewardship will fully compensate mine or other families for what was lost.
This article was supported with funding from Northwestern Medill Data-Driven Reporting Project.
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This article appeared in the November 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “What California owes for Native land.”
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