CHAPTER 3
LANDS DIVIDED BY RACE
in late august 1980, a small brush fire swept up the side of the San Jacinto Mountains that loom over the city of Palm Springs, California, and reignited an old battle over land. Desert winds blew the fire south, past downtown Palm Springs and then into the sacred canyons of the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation. The community’s ancestral home was scorched—but this natural disaster presented an opportunity the City of Palm Springs had long awaited.
For more than fifty years, members of the Agua Caliente had been fighting off the city’s attempts to take control of their lands. Among the city government’s many objectives was to build a road through the middle of the reservation following the Palm Canyon Creek bed over the San Jacinto Mountains to link up with a highway on the other side. The wildfire seemed to provide the city with an excuse to kick into gear at last.
A fleet of heavy D9 bulldozers was waiting in the palm canyons before the flames were even extinguished. The workers went so far as to mark the reservation’s burnt trees with blue spray paint for removal. “There was this thinking at the time that they could just go on a federal reservation and start clearing the roads and do anything they want,” recalled Dr. Sean Milanovich, whose father, Richard Milanovich, was Tribal chairman for the Agua Caliente for nearly thirty years. It took members of the Agua Caliente physically interrupting the work to stop the land from being cleared and snatched away. Dr. Milanovich recalls that his father and other relatives “were up there and they were stopping these guys. They were up there all night. And they fought a couple times. My dad told the city, ‘You know what, I know you want to make a road but you’re not going to do it on our reservation.’”1
The city’s attempt to use the fire as a pretext for yet another land grab formed one of Dr. Milanovich’s earliest childhood memories. He recounts that his father “was completely adamant about not letting the city through. And especially to have control of the land and drive those D9s through our precious forests, through our precious palm oases and canyons, downing palm trees, downing cottonwoods, downing alders.” It was just one episode among many in the long campaign to wrest land from the Agua Caliente and knock them down.
Today the city of Palm Springs is the Las Vegas of California. It is a playground for the rich and famous nestled right at the heart of the Coachella Valley. All the valley’s casinos, Hollywood-style entertainment, and day spas offer a glitzy distraction from the area’s troubled history. Before Palm Springs became smothered in blond hair and bright lights, it was a patchwork quilt of wealthy enclaves amid poorer areas. That pattern, set in the early to mid-1900s, mapped directly onto land ownership and use and the fate of the communities that remained there generations afterward. Who got the land, and how, made all the difference.
The story of Palm Springs is the story of how land reallocation put white settlers and entrepreneurs at the top. Incoming whites snatched land repeatedly from the Agua Caliente, tried to erase their language and traditions, and created a social and economic system that marginalized them as outsiders and dependents in their own territory. “As intelligent and as strong as we are… because our skin was darker, because we did not speak the same language, and we were not Christian, they [whites] felt that they could do what they want,” Dr. Milanovich told me. “And so they stole our land… and they legitimized themselves to be… rulers.” But the Palm Springs story is far from unique.
Land power is at the root of racial hierarchy. Select racial groups can dominate others by stealing their land and then creating political rules and economic mechanisms to entrench that dominance. As power in these societies becomes tightly linked with the racialized ownership of land and the privileges that ownership confers, a race-based social order is woven into the social fabric. How people are born, how they are raised and live, the education they receive, their work opportunities, and even when and how they die are all shaped by the color of their skin.
We have seen this script replayed time and again in societies whose lands were distributed through settler reforms. Notions of racial hierarchy are present in these societies from the start, with settlers viewing themselves as spiritually and socially superior to indigenous populations. Land power radically deepens this hierarchy and makes it even more rigid. Settlers ravage indigenous populations by appropriating their land, waging war on them, and spreading new diseases among them. That adds potent political and economic dimensions to race that put settlers in a superior position to indigenous peoples.
The story of the Coachella Valley, the Agua Caliente, and the newcomers who settled Palm Springs shows us how such a racial hierarchy between whites and indigenous peoples is built from the ground up. It also highlights the one thing that would most help to deconstruct the long-standing racial hierarchy—the land itself.
the coachella valley around Palm Springs was since time immemorial the territory of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. Recent excavations in downtown Palm Springs indicate that their ancestors spread into the valley and neighboring mountains and passes after migrating south to the area about 8,000 years ago.
The environmental zones of the region shaped how the Cahuilla related to the land and its resources. The Cahuilla living in the valleys relied on mesquite, a legume, as a major food source, gathering the seedpods from the flowering desert shrub that produces them between June and August. They also gathered dates from native palms; harvested agave, both for food and for making clothing and nets; hunted small game; and used other local seeds, as well as roots, flowers, and fruits, as both food and medicine. Because of the heat, these Cahuilla lived in well-ventilated structures made from palm, willow, and arrow weed or in lean-to shelters nestled in rock formations.
The Cahuilla living in the mountains gathered and processed acorns in October and November. They also hunted deer, mountain goats, rabbits, squirrels, and other small game. They built sturdier shelters than those who lived in the valley, constructing their homes from earth, logs, and bark.
Cahuilla society was divided into ritual groups, the Wildcat and the Coyote, which were in turn divided into clans. Three of these clans later banded together to form the present-day Agua Caliente Band of the Cahuilla.2 Villages typically had between one hundred and several hundred inhabitants. The Cahuilla occupied them year-round, though large portions of a village would move for several weeks at a time to harvest or collect food.
Trails connected villages and linked them to resources and neighbors. The Cahuilla mostly traded between east and west, linking groups from the Colorado River to coastal peoples. It was both ceremonial and economic in nature. They traded for shell beads, coastal acorns, and volcanic rock that could be used for cooking and in exchange offered arrowheads, food staples, and other materials.3
Although it is hard to date the origins of their agriculture precisely, the Agua Caliente were clearly growing some crops in the early 1800s. They dug irrigation ditches from nearby streams to grow corn, pumpkins, and melons. The hot springs, located in today’s Palm Springs, provided a focal point for ceremonial activity, healing rituals, and other gatherings. For the Cahuilla, according to Dr. Milanovich, “everything is inside the land. Everything. Our heart comes from the land. All of our traditional stories come from the land. How we came on the land, how we move on the land, how we gathered different plants, how we hunted. All of our stories and songs are from the land. The land heals us, protects us, takes care of us.”4
The Cahuilla’s first contact with Europeans did not come from British colonizers to the American colonies, but from Mexico. At first, the Spanish began setting up trade routes along the West Coast between their northern missions in California and their Mexican possessions to the south. But serious disturbances for the Cahuilla did not arrive until after Mexico wrested independence from Spain in the early 1800s. Eager to make the break definitive, and under pressure from northern elites, the new Mexican government started doling out enormous land grants to ranchers in its California territories. This included the western range of Cahuilla land, though the Agua Caliente managed to avoid having their land appropriated, even if temporarily, at that time. Probably owing to the rugged terrain and harsh landscape of eastern Cahuilla territory where the Agua Caliente resided, their land was not yet deemed a prime target of settlement.5
This brief period of history is known as Mexico’s “ranchero” period. It lasted only a few decades, and it was Mexico’s version of a Wild West. This era produced the first recorded history of the Agua Caliente area, courtesy of the diary of a Mexican lieutenant on an exploratory expedition. He was part of a group sent by the Mexican government to find an overland route linking Sonora to California. The lieutenant’s writings indicate that there was previous knowledge of the existence of the area. The Cahuilla called the area Séc-he (boiling water), but early Spanish explorers, and the Mexicans who followed them, translated it as Agua Caliente (hot water). The new name stuck.
Meanwhile, a far more grave threat to the Cahuilla was building thousands of miles to the east. Settlers on the Eastern Seaboard were gobbling up land from Native Americans and laying the foundations for an inexorable march to the Pacific. This march would eventually swallow up the Cahuilla.
early settlers in colonial America lived a difficult and precarious life. They arrived after a long journey at sea from Europe to outposts perched on the Atlantic Seaboard. Many were deposited on the shores still ill or malnourished from their ocean voyage. Unfamiliar with local land, resources, and weather, they suffered hunger and cold on arrival. Lifespans were short and mortality was high in the early years.
Native Americans helped to ease the transition. The Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe of coastal Massachusetts and Rhode Island, for instance, shared food and local knowledge with Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620.6 And they shared in feasts at the time of the Pilgrims’ early harvests, which some trace as the root of the modern Thanksgiving holiday.
Before long the new colonies started to flourish, and the trickle of immigrants became a stream, then a river. The absence of religious persecution was part of the attraction. Colonists could practice their beliefs openly in the New World without the shadow of punishment and violence hanging over their heads.
But the biggest prize was land. The British Crown fostered the growth of the colonies through enormous land charters. Unlike in Europe, where rigid class structures and land pressure precluded land ownership for all but the most privileged upper strata of society, settlers had the real promise of lands of their own if they could simply make it to the frontier. This was particularly the case in the northern colonies.
Take, for instance, the area then known as the Province of Pennsylvania. King Charles II granted an enormous tract of land spanning contemporary Pennsylvania and Delaware to William Penn. In a stroke this grant turned him into the largest private landowner in the world—but now he had to settle it. Penn set about attracting colonists to the land to raise money and embarked on ambitious settlement programs, most notably an enormous schooling program that was unparalleled elsewhere in the world in terms of its broad access. Penn saw education as a key to religious literacy and enlightenment. His experiment turned parts of the northern United States into some of the most literate early societies on earth.
There was, of course, a catch. The land that the British Crown was doling out to white settlers was already inhabited by Native Americans. There is no consensus on the size of the precolonial population in what is now the continental United States, but estimates range from about 1 million to 10 million.7
It didn’t take long for relations between settlers and Native Americans to get testy. Colonists brought new diseases with them to the New World. Smallpox and measles ravaged local populations. The settlers’ march inland from the coast posed an unmistakable threat to Native American homelands. And their behavior didn’t help. A number of early European explorers, traders, and settlers abducted indigenous peoples and sold them into slavery, or tried to kill or capture indigenous leaders and other community members. And settlers did not hide their beliefs in their racial and religious superiority over Native Americans, which they used to justify land grabs.
Colonial American policy toward Native American lands settled into an uneasy mix of treaty-making and violent Indian removal, often in tandem. Peaceful coexistence rarely lasted more than a couple of decades before there would be another aggressive push toward frontier settlement, resulting in pitched battles between settlers and militiamen on the one hand and Native Americans on the other.
Spanish explorers and missionaries on the West Coast closer to the Cahuilla did not behave any better. The Spanish supported the ambitious Catholic missionary Junípero Serra in setting up a string of missions in the mid- to late 1700s, spanning from San Diego to Sonoma. The goal was to civilize and Christianize local indigenous populations. They reached into the Cahuilla and other local populations and brought their members to the missions for baptism and conversion.
These missions doubled as labor and death camps. Those who were corralled at the missions were forced to work without pay, and those who escaped were often hunted down by the Spanish missionaries, who regarded indigenous populations as inferior. As Serra, sainted by Pope Francis in 2015, wrote in 1780, “That spiritual fathers should punish their sons, the Indians, with blows appears to be as old as the conquest of [the Americas]; so general in fact that the saints do not seem to be any exception to the rule.” The missions also sought to stamp out local customs and culture.
European diseases decimated local populations here too, and, in the end, more Native Americans died in the missions than were born there.8 Fortunately for the Agua Caliente, who lived at the eastern fringes of the Cahuilla people farthest from California’s coast, they were too far from the missions to become their prey.
Back East, land settlement took a turn with American independence. The land chartering system came to an end, and newer, more rapacious systems took its place. One popular new policy was to designate large tracts of frontier land as military bounty land. With federal revenues running low, volunteer and ill-paid war veterans could instead receive bounty land grants in government-created military tracts. The government deliberately placed these as buffer zones between settled areas and frontier areas where Native Americans resided.
In creating a military tract in Ohio Territory in 1796, for instance, President George Washington argued that it “would connect our government with the frontiers, extend our settlements progressively, and plant a brave, a hardy and respectable race of people as our advanced post, who would be always ready and willing (in case of hostility) to combat the savages and check their incursions.”9
The Great Reshuffle had arrived in America. Territorial acquisitions from Spain, France, Great Britain, and Mexico in the first half of the nineteenth century tripled all previous holdings. From the mid-1840s to the early 1850s alone, the United States wrested Texas, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and parts of several other states from Mexico through annexations and forced purchases. That removed the last administrative and political barriers between the growing mass of white settlers in the East and western indigenous peoples, including the Cahuilla. Land settlement was about to reach a fevered pitch in the new American West.
just decades before settlers from the East arrived to Cahuilla territory, the growing swell of willing settlers, combined with the political and economic attractions of settlement—both on the western frontier and in the South in an expansion of the slave economy—drove the US government to ramp up Indian removal. President Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830 was one of the most brutal settlement policies of the era, sparking the infamous Trail of Tears that removed roughly 100,000 Indians from the southeast to designated “Indian Territory” west of the Mississippi River. The Chickasaw, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Muscogee Creek nations, as well as many others, suffered forced marches that cost thousands of lives. The government sold off some of these lands to settle war debts and granted others to new settlers.
But these policies created their own problems. Officials from new states that bordered Indian Territory sought a buffer against what they viewed as a dangerous security threat. The Missouri General Assembly, for instance, petitioned Congress for a more densely settled border region to protect its citizens who were “surrounded by restless hordes of native savages.”10 Congress repeatedly responded to appeals like these by providing land to armed settlers or to those who promised to ward off Indian attacks.
Westward expansion after the Mexican-American War pushed the potential for settlement all the way to the Pacific Ocean and to Cahuilla territory. The annexation of Mexican territory from Texas to California and the acquisition of Oregon Country in the 1840s, however, quickly made the prospect of Indian westward removal untenable. “Manifest destiny” would have to be accomplished another way.
As American settlers began trickling into Southern California around the time of the Gold Rush and the Mexican-American War, the Cahuilla and their lands became targets. Only narrowly avoiding Indian removal, they would now have to face the next American Indian policy tool: reservations.
The US government cordoned off indigenous communities into designated and often undesirable areas away from white settlements. The Cahuilla and hundreds of other groups met this fate. But before their fate was sealed, the Cahuilla first passed through an unsettling period of treaty-making and settler incursions on their land.
The Gold Rush and westward expansion brought American settlers to Cahuilla territory beginning in the 1850s. Land encroachment and attempts at taxation drew the ire of the Cahuilla along with the nearby Cupeño, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples. The anger boiled over in an abortive uprising and brought the communities into negotiation with US government agents. Leaders of these communities signed the Treaty of Temecula on January 5, 1852, under the threat of being executed, forcibly ceding their land base in exchange for a far smaller permanent reservation. The US Senate rejected the treaty but ordered its decision to be held in secrecy. Government policy in the region then repeatedly violated what the groups thought had been agreed upon, cutting them down in such a way that they could no longer successfully defend their interests or their land.11
A few years later, on May 15, 1856, the principal Cahuilla chief and twenty-four other Cahuilla leaders sent a petition to the commissioner of Indian affairs complaining about continued white land grabs: “From time immemorial we have lived upon and occupied the lands of and adjacent to the Pass of San Gorgonio.… Since the occupation of California by the Americans and particularly within the last two or three years we have been encroached upon by the white settlers who have taken possession of a large portion of our best farming and grazing lands and by diverting the water from our lands deprive us to a great extent of the means of irrigation.” The petition went on to explain the consequences of these losses, and to ask for reprieve: “We have thus been frequently obliged to abandon portions of our improved lands greatly to the detriment and distress of our people.… What we particularly desire and ask of the Government is that certain public lands may be set apart for our use exclusively (which lands we have long occupied and improved) and from which we may not be forced by white settlers.”12 The petition nonetheless fell on deaf ears.
One year later a major earthquake hit the area, reducing the flow of stream water in the canyons where many Agua Caliente lived and forcing them into life on the floor of the Coachella Valley where they could take advantage of groundwater. That would bring them into even more direct conflict with settlers.
the us government’s efforts to settle the West ramped up considerably in the 1860s with the Homestead Act. The Homestead Act transformed the United States into the largest freeholder society on earth. It granted intrepid frontier settlers up to 160 acres of public land for a small fee. Settlers had to live on the land for five years and farm it, at which point they could file for a land title. Prospective settlers jumped at the opportunity, and waves of settlers rushed across the plains through progressive homesteading and laid claim to Native American lands. Some 1.6 million individuals laid claim to 270 million acres of land—an area equivalent in size to Texas and California combined—over the course of the program.
Sure enough, within a couple of decades settlers had washed over California and the areas inhabited by and surrounding the Cahuilla. But the final shape of dispossession for the Agua Caliente and several other Cahuilla bands occurred not at the hands of homesteaders but of a railroad company and the US government. The US government sought to supercharge western settlement and development by building railroads spanning thousands of miles to connect growing but far-flung population settlements. Railroad companies, however, were in their infancy and strapped for cash. The US government came up with a solution: granting the railroad companies vast free tracts of public land alongside rail tracks that companies could in turn sell or use as collateral to issue bonds in order to raise capital.13
Public land “checkerboarding” was born through this solution. The Public Land Survey System had already divided most western territories into an enormous grid of six-by-six-mile squares known as townships, which in turn were divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile each. The government decided to give odd-numbered sections to railroad companies and keep the remaining even-numbered sections. It did so within a fixed distance on either side of railway tracks, typically ten miles. This generated a sprawling checkerboard pattern of private-public land ownership across sections of the West.
Railroad land granting began in the Midwest and South in 1850 and extended all the way to the Pacific Ocean with the Pacific Railway Acts dating between 1862 and 1871. The grants eventually covered 170 million acres of land in the frontier. It was the Pacific Railway Acts that carved up the Agua Caliente.
Homesteading and railroad land grants worked in tandem to dispossess indigenous peoples and enshrine whiteness in the western frontier. A sea of white settlers surrounded and encroached on Native Americans. This was the birth of a new racial hierarchy in the West.
The Homestead Act on paper made all adults who were citizens or in the process of gaining citizenship eligible to claim land. But in practice, there was an overwhelming bias in favor of white settlers.
Congress sought to use the Homestead Act and other settlement policies to manufacture white majorities in lands previously occupied by non-whites.14 Numerous nascent states on the western frontier appealed in part to their whiteness through settlement in making the case for statehood.
The economics of settlement quickened this process. Acquiring land was only a small part of the expense in moving west and starting a new life. Settlers had to finance the journey, buy farm inputs, build a house, and survive until the first harvest. Saving on a land purchase would have only represented about 10 to 30 percent of these costs.15 The expenses involved put land claims out of reach for many minority groups that struggled with poverty or could not easily escape their circumstances.16
The heyday of the Homestead Act, from 1862 through the 1920s, was also the height of white European immigration to the United States. From 1870 until the 1890s, most immigrants arrived from western and northern Europe.17 The trend then shifted to immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Immigration slowed starting in World War I. The decline accelerated with immigration restrictions in the 1920s, followed by the Great Depression. Furthermore, growing white populations on the Eastern Seaboard in the late 1800s pushed younger generations to seek new livelihoods in the West.
Railroad grants had a similar racial bent. Most grants went to politically connected private companies backed by white financiers.18 Indeed, the corruption and cronyism involved in these grants sparked a public outcry that shut the program down to new grants in 1871. But enormous tracts of land had already been allocated and in most cases remained at the disposal of the companies.19 The railroad companies sold large portions of these tracts to wealthy white buyers and speculators, and some of these buyers sought in turn to rent plots to newly arriving white settlers.20 Companies sold other portions to the flood of white settlers arriving from the East as part of the homesteading trend.
in an unfortunate dint of fate, the Cahuilla lived at a crossroads for Gold Rush prospectors traveling between the valleys around Los Angeles and gold deposits in southern Arizona. This put them directly in the crosshairs of the Southern Pacific Railroad in the 1860s. The US government gave Southern Pacific a right-of-way to build its railroad straight through the Coachella Valley and Cahuilla territory, piggybacking off early stagecoach routes.21
As was common practice, the government allocated the railroad a checkerboard of one-square-mile sections of land around the railway line. That carved up Cahuilla land. By executive order in 1876, the government allocated the odd-numbered sections of the checkerboard to the railway and created a reservation comprising the even-numbered sections called the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation. It expanded the reservation in 1877 to incorporate more squares in additional adjacent townships. The government constructed nine other reservations for the Cahuilla in addition to the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation.22 It recognized separate Cahuilla bands corresponding to each of these reservations. The government created most of these Cahuilla reservations in a checkerboard fashion like Agua Caliente at a similar time period. Several bands lived farther from the railway line and avoided this particular fate.
The Agua Caliente Indian Reservation, established in 1876 to 1877, is a checkerboard pattern of alternating square miles shown shaded here. (Credit: National Archives NAID: 351088153.)
These reservations marked the continued loss of land for the Cahuilla. Chief Cabazon of the Desert Cahuilla Cabazon Band told a local government Indian agent in 1898 that “when white brother come, we make glad, tell him to hunt and ride. He say, ‘Give me a little for my own,’ so we move little way, not hunt there. Then more come. They say move more, and we move again. So many times. Now we are small people, we have little place.”23 Whereas Cahuilla territory previously covered most of what is now Riverside County and parts of several neighboring counties in Southern California, reservations shoehorned them into less than 5 percent of this land.
The Agua Caliente Reservation, like other Native American and Cahuilla reservations, was ostensibly an autonomous space where the Tribe would have sovereignty over its own affairs and could conduct self-governance. But that promise was a false one from the start.
Increased contact with settlers and prospectors in the years prior to the establishment of the reservation exposed the Agua Caliente to western communicable diseases. Smallpox and measles outbreaks ravaged the population and left them weakened and depleted. In an investigative report to Congress in 1883, the poet and activist Helen Hunt Jackson characterized the early reservation as “wretchedly poor.”
The land grab by the US government and the railroad fractionalized the community. It frayed the community’s rich link with the land and reduced it to only a small remnant of its ancestral territory. The management of resources, spiritual practices, and economic activities, all rooted in land, became strained and heavily disjointed. This experience traced those of tribes such as the Navajo Nation, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Sahnish, and many others that had critical portions of their homelands seized from them.
The US government then repeatedly broke its agreements with the Agua Caliente and meddled in their affairs. It prohibited tribal self-governance on the reservation and instead installed the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs to conduct reservation governance and manage tribal affairs. This situation continued for decades.
The government similarly held reservation land in trust rather than turning it over to the Agua Caliente. The paternalistic logic held that Native Americans would lose their land either out of stupidity or short-sightedness. One newspaper describing land use in the reservation in 1969 put it in these denigrating terms: “The government held the land in trust for the benefit of the tribe until such time as the tribe might become sufficiently sophisticated in land management as to intelligently govern the future use of their own land.”24
Government agents adopted practices of assimilation that sought to subjugate the Agua Caliente. Starting in 1890, children from the reservation were forced to attend off-reservation boarding schools, including the St. Boniface Indian School, the Perris Indian School, and later the infamous Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. These schools taught students English and vocational skills. They forbade the practice of cultural and spiritual traditions. The idea was in keeping with the goal stated succinctly by the US general who had founded the first federal Indian boarding school: “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
The Bureau of Indian Affairs replicated the suppression of cultural and spiritual practices on the reservation. It banned the culturally important mourning (nukil) ceremony, and it sought to promote farming in the reservation as part of the effort to “civilize” the population. In the words of the local chief engineer overseeing agriculture, this would “render this little band of Indians independent of further aid from the Government.” The Bureau of Indian Affairs teamed up with the Department of Agriculture to start experimenting with farming desert crops in the area. Its agents built irrigation systems and made other improvements in the 1910s and established an experimental station on Agua Caliente land despite not receiving consent from the community.25
The US Indian service farmer in charge, Adrian Maxwell, whose promotion within the Bureau of Indian Affairs was linked to increasing local agricultural production, pushed ahead with planting date palms, grapefruit and apricot trees, grapevines, and alfalfa. Maxwell lamented that “the red man is the easiest man to get discouraged in the world” when he sensed caution among the Agua Caliente, who had lived through periods of drought, extreme heat, and damaging storms and had reason to believe that the government’s agricultural efforts were folly.26
A confluence of factors led the government to later tap the brakes on agriculture in the reservation. Maxwell departed in 1916, and drought in the 1920s dealt a lasting blow to the crops. Increasing tourism in the 1920s provided alternatives to agricultural work. In 1924, a supervising engineer observed, “It is becoming more and more apparent that these Indians will secure their livelihood through working for the White settlers rather than through their efforts at farming.”27
Yet the Agua Caliente had still only seen the tip of the iceberg. Soon the Dawes Act would breach the hull.
whereas previous policies had relocated Native Americans and cordoned them off into reservations, the Dawes Act of 1887 cracked open reservations themselves to further land dispossession. Also known as the General Allotment Act, the Dawes Act accelerated and systematized dispossession at a grand scale.
Like most federally recognized tribes that had been confined to reservations, the Agua Caliente and other Cahuilla groups owned land in a communal fashion in the late 1800s.28 Among the Agua Caliente, land access was further divided across four main clans that had distinct territorial claims. The Dawes Act aimed to break up Tribal landholdings by subdividing them into individually owned plots through a process known as land allotment.
Congress authorized land allotment within the Agua Caliente Reservation in 1891. But it did not begin until the 1920s, when increasing tourism to the hot springs increased the value of the land. When the land allotment surveyors showed up, the Tribal leadership and dozens of Tribal members pushed back in a letter to the US secretary of the interior. “We ask you to take away these allotment surveyors until we can find out just what they are going to do. Nobody notified us they were coming,” the letter said. “The Indians never signed any agreement or made any petition for allotment.… We have patent for our land and we do not want it to be taken away without our consent. We want to keep it whole.”29
Around the same time, the city tried to seize control of Indian Canyons, the ancestral home of the Agua Caliente at the south of the reservation. Tourists were flocking to the area to visit the stunning palm oases, and local businesses wanted a bite. The city had Tribal leaders arrested and encouraged the US government to turn the canyons into a national park. The government briefly took control of the land but then dropped it when the Agua Caliente fought back.30
Although the federal government left the land in Indian Canyons, the land allotment surveyors were not so easy to send home. In response to the Agua Caliente’s request for the government to take them away, a dismissive reply from the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs informed them that “it is still believed it will be for the good of your people to have the allotments made.”31 Allotment was similarly imposed against resistance in several other Cahuilla reservations, such as Torres-Martinez. The start of allotment in the Agua Caliente Reservation marked a divisive moment in its history as, one by one, members of one clan began separating themselves from the Tribe and their clan to claim plots of another clan’s land. Those individuals also coalesced into a political group that sought to wrest control of the Tribe from communal traditionalists.32 A US government administrator oversaw the parceling of reservation land to individual Tribal members.
Together with forcibly sending Indian children to boarding schools, where they were compelled to speak English and dress in western clothing, land allotment sought to break down tribal cohesion and assimilate Indians into American cultural norms and capitalist economic practices. The goal was to use the power of laws to accomplish what extermination could not.
White politicians viewed the transition as a moral, economic, and cultural imperative critical to building an American national identity. In his 1901 State of the Union Address, President Teddy Roosevelt said, “In my judgment the time has arrived when we should definitely make up our minds to recognize the Indian as an individual and not as a member of a tribe. The General Allotment Act [Dawes Act] is a mighty pulverizing engine to break up the tribal mass.… The Indian should be treated as an individual—like the white man.”
When a reservation—such as the Agua Caliente’s—was opened for allotment under the Dawes Act, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of the US Department of the Interior, granted individual families on the reservation plots of land that it held in trust on their behalf.33 “Excess lands” not allotted could be sold off to private citizens from outside the reservation. This policy ultimately stripped nearly 100 million acres from all reservation land, an area roughly the size of California.
As land values in Palm Springs increased with tourism, outsiders wanted a piece of the “excess” Agua Caliente Reservation lands that could be released in the wake of allotment. Clan politics also drove allotment. The Kauisik clan of the Agua Caliente controlled the land around the hot springs. In order to share tourism revenue more broadly among clans, it gave land access to other clans to set up businesses around the hot springs, provided that they shared some of their revenue to help the community as a whole. Members from other clans who wanted more security for their land claims than Kauisik promises, and more autonomy in what they did with their revenues, were the first to take up allotment.34
In the Agua Caliente Reservation, however, the government played games with those who sought individual plots. The Bureau of Indian Affairs authorized community members claims of forty-seven acres, divided between a two-acre lot in town, five acres of irrigated land, and forty acres of dry land.35 Eventually over one hundred of the Agua Caliente claims were granted, and their allotments constituted about 15 percent of reservation land. But they struggled to assert ownership over these claims.
The local government agent, Harry Wadsworth, granted provisional allotment certificates to the first group of claimants in the 1920s, promising quick approval by the secretary of the interior. Some claimants started using their allotments. But government approval dragged.
Several Agua Caliente members started litigation over a decade later to have their allotments approved. In 1944, the US Supreme Court, in Arenas v. United States, ruled that the secretary of the interior had to make the allotments.36 The secretary of the interior still initially refused the allotment schedule from the 1920s and then five years later did an about-face. But by this time, the allotments varied widely in value because of population growth and development in Palm Springs. In 1954, several Kauisik clan members of the Agua Caliente sued for recognition of the Tribe’s assignment of land prior to the cross-clan allotment claims. The courts ordered “equalization” to ensure fairness in allotments so that assets and revenues would be shared more broadly among the group’s members.
This too sparked a land battle. The City of Palm Springs, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and even several members of the Agua Caliente Tribal Council sought instead to sell Tribal lands off to a corporation that would in turn dispose of the land and distribute the proceeds to Tribal members.37 Nonetheless, the Tribe ultimately sought to maintain its land base. It pursued equalization through legislation to reduce the “surplus” designation of unallotted land under the Dawes Act and prevent the mandated subsequent disposal of “surplus” Tribal land.38 Eventually, in 1959, Congress passed the Equalization Act, and the government finalized and formalized the Agua Caliente allotments.
By the time the legal limbo had ended, the government had long since changed the rules of the game. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1934 Indian Reorganization Act ended the Dawes Act’s land allotment policy as part of the New Deal for Native Americans. This left a patchwork of landholding across reservation lands. Land allotment had proceeded, but in the Agua Caliente Reservation it was incomplete. A checkerboard of property rights among individual owners was now nested within the checkerboard pattern of the reservation. Some had fee simple ownership and others held land in trust. Other reservations never experienced land allotment and therefore retained communal tribal ownership.
The Indian Reorganization Act froze all individual trust lands in trusteeship into the future and ended further allotments for tribes that experienced it. The checkerboard of property rights within the Agua Caliente Reservation therefore continues today. The result is a dizzying and almost comically complex pattern of land use. The varieties of land use now range from Tribal land to privately owned fee simple land, allotted land within the reservation, off-reservation Tribal land, and other private lands. The effect of all of this complexity was unfortunately simple: a rigid racial hierarchy, reinforced by Tribal land divisions that complicate the ability to plan and flourish as a community when pressured by outside interests.
the agua caliente and other Cahuilla bands alike struggled economically and socially as their neighbors in Palm Springs flourished. As attempts at agriculture foundered in the 1920s, many Cahuilla took lower-status jobs in the growing white-owned tourist industry as toll collectors, campground operators, and hotel workers, while others worked as store owners, fire guards, and policemen.39 They had fewer job opportunities, less education, and worse health care than whites in the area.
As late as the 1940s, Tribal members of the Agua Caliente could not use basic hospital services in Palm Springs. Richard Milanovich, the former Tribal chairman, who also fought the city’s attempt to build a road through the reservation following the 1980 fire, was born in nearby Soboba, California, at a hospital funded by the state, because his mother was turned away from giving birth in Palm Springs. When she experienced complications during pregnancy and went to the Palm Springs hospital, the doctors told her, “We’re only going to let you come in here because you’re having complications. When you have your baby, you have to go to the Indian hospital. Anyone that’s not white is not allowed to be born here.”40
Community divisions deepened. Forced assimilation practices eased with the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, but while many sought a quick return to Tribal governance, others preferred the greater political and economic independence associated with federal allotments from the Tribal land base.41
By the 1950s, the railroad’s checkerboard sections of the Palm Springs area became wealthy and white, while the Agua Caliente’s checkerboard sections on the reservation were home to comparatively poorer Tribal communities. The reservation sections also attracted other disadvantaged minorities because they were more affordable. African Americans and Latinos moved to the Palm Springs area in large numbers from the 1920s through the 1950s to work in the growing tourist economy. They settled as renters on reservation land. Many of them moved into the heart of downtown Palm Springs in one of the Agua Caliente’s checkerboard squares known as Section 14, which also contains the hot springs.
Short-term limits to leases on Tribal land that were stipulated in federal law entrenched the disparity between the railroad’s sections and the Agua Caliente’s sections. These limits discouraged commercial development and fostered low-income housing where minorities lived segregated from the more privileged white neighborhoods of the city. The City of Palm Springs compounded these problems by refusing to provide utilities to Section 14 residents residing on reservation land. Tribal members resorted to erecting plywood and tar-paper houses, digging septic fields, running water pipelines, and burning trash in that part of the city.42
The Agua Caliente knew the intrinsic value of the land but could not take advantage of it. The chairman of the new all-women Agua Caliente Tribal Council, Eileen Miguel, indicated as much in a congressional hearing on land leasing in the mid-1950s. When Miguel stated to the committee chairman that she was from Palm Springs, the chairman ignorantly replied, “Then you have money running out of your ears, is that correct? We have heard how wealthy you are.” Miguel replied, “No, I don’t have any money running out of my ears. I’m sorry, and I slightly resent what Mr. Marshall said about us being rich. We’re not rich. We have valuable land, but you can’t eat dirt.”43
That land became much more valuable starting in 1959 when individual allotments were finalized and the Agua Caliente successfully negotiated with the federal government to lease their lands for up to ninety-nine years. The wealthier white community saw growing lucrative business opportunities in Section 14. It was a game changer, triggering an explosive, racialized battle over zoning, leasing, and Tribal sovereignty.
What happened next is what happens in many growing communities where the rich live alongside the poor: gentrification and land grabs. The City of Palm Springs sought to expel the poorer inhabitants of Section 14 to clear it for business. But there was no obvious way to do so on reservation land. Land power can cut both ways, after all.
The city sharpened its elbows. It threatened to evict tenants whose homes were not up to city code. And it continued withholding utilities from the area by falsely claiming that residents on reservation land did not pay property taxes.44 It also aggressively took advantage of a Conservatorship and Guardianship Program that the Tribal Council had agreed to as part of the land leasing deal. The program enabled local court-appointed conservators to manage the affairs of individual Tribal members. These conservators quickly turned on the Agua Caliente and their poor minority tenants in Section 14. They evicted tenants en masse and worked with the city to bulldoze portions of the downtown area. Some people had their homes bulldozed while they were at work.45
The city leadership invoked racist tropes in justifying its actions. Referring to the Agua Caliente who were leasing the land to largely Black and Latino populations, Mayor Frank Bogert proclaimed, “They are letting the places for flat-out moochers.… If you think of the value of the land and think of the kind of junk there, it’s just scandalous.” City Councilman Ed McCoubrey chipped in, saying, “These people are not interested in improving themselves.”46
The city’s scorched-earth tactics broke down community resistance to development. One former resident, Alfonso Mediano, recounted that, “after that, we lost track of each other. As small as that town is, the only time we saw each other was at a funeral or [when] somebody got married.”47
The authoritarian stance of the city and the conservators only ended with state intervention in 1968. The California assistant attorney general, Loren Miller Jr., who conducted an investigation, concluded in his blistering report that “the City of Palm Springs not only disregarded the residents of Section 14 as property owners, taxpayers and voters; Palm Springs ignored that the residents of Section 14 were human beings.”
Conservators also delved deep into the affairs of Tribal members unrelated to Section 14 in the decade when they operated. Their paternalism effectively stripped the ability of members to manage their own land, their finances, and their futures. One enrolled member, Moraino Patencio, related how his brother was born just weeks after the finalization of allotments and the establishment of the conservatorship program. Like any other Tribal member born after the end of allotment, his brother had no avenue for getting his own piece of Tribal land. He inherited some off-reservation land outside Palm Springs from his godmother, but a court-appointed conservator complicated his ability to receive it, and his father had to go to court to try to get access to it. “It was just an impossible situation,” he told me.48 For this “oversight,” the court, conservators, and lawyers all charged exorbitant fees.
parallel versions of the Agua Caliente story played out across other Cahuilla bands in Southern California. All the Cahuilla groups lost land to white settlers and were forced onto reservations, many of them in dysfunctional checkerboard patterns like in the Agua Caliente case. European diseases ravaged their people, and the federal government sought to eliminate their customs and language through policies of forced schooling, assimilation, and outright punishment. Many Cahuilla lost further land and suffered community divisions with land allotment and government development initiatives. And some groups faced antagonistic city and local governments, though none quite as hostile, powerful, and duplicitous as Palm Springs. This broad-based subjugation gave birth to a racial hierarchy across the region that paralleled the situation in Palm Springs.
Native American displacement and settler land grabs over the course of the United States’ early history manufactured a new and rigid racial order for hundreds of other Native American tribes across the United States as well. White settlers made economic, social, and political gains while indigenous groups lost on all of these fronts. This new order was entrenched at every turn with a crushing array of discriminatory policies that lasted at least through the 1960s and in some cases longer.
Behind it all were decisions about who got land, followed by decisions about how they could live on it, keep it, and preserve their lives on it—or not. Land reallocation can create prosperity, but it can also create misery and racism if we let it.
Systematic data on the welfare of Native Americans as a whole in the 1800s are unavailable. That is in part by design. The US Constitution mandated that only “taxed” Indians—those who cut relations with their tribe to live among the general population—would count toward congressional representation. The US Census Bureau therefore did not collect information on the vast majority of “non-taxed” Indians.
The blossoming of the reservation system and the growing interest in managing Native American populations, however, led Congress to appropriate funds for separate censuses of Native Americans in 1890, 1900, and 1910. Most of the detailed information from 1890 was destroyed in a fire. That makes 1900 the first clear snapshot of Native American communities.
The picture is a stark one. The Native American population in the United States had declined to around 240,000 people by 1900. This number reflected nothing short of a demographic collapse compared with pre-settlement America.
There was a wide gap in the welfare of Native Americans compared with whites that reflects the pendulum swing in land power. Life expectancy was about forty years for Native Americans against fifty years for whites.49 This was even shorter than for the Black population, which had a life expectancy of forty-two years. There was also a considerable gap in childhood mortality, with Native American children dying at a higher rate than white children.
Native Americans themselves, of course, are widely ethnically diverse. They also have unique histories of cultural loss, forced removal, conflict, and assimilation in the face of American land settlement. And some had been on reservations longer than others as of 1900. Reflecting these differences, some nations, such as the Cherokee and Chickasaw, had relatively low mortality rates and longer lifespans. Others, such as the Dakota and Lakota, fared considerably worse. Nearly every tribe was disadvantaged compared with whites.
The early twentieth century was a period of stagnation for Native Americans. Stripped of much of their land and of control over what remained, incomes among Native Americans on reservations grew at a meager 0.25 percent annual rate from 1918 to 1942 compared with a 2.3 percent rate for the US population as a whole.50 Income gains across the country advanced in the latter half of the twentieth century. But Native Americans remained starkly disadvantaged. US census data indicates that in 1969, one-third of Native American families lived in poverty, compared with just over 10 percent of white families.51 Per capita income was half that of whites. And Native Americans had the lowest rates of economic mobility of any racial group in the United States.52
Discrimination and harmful government policies perpetuated this disparity. Starting in the 1950s, the US government sought to “terminate” remaining Native American reservations and complete its land grab. As part of this effort, the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 ended federal funding for basic services, schools, and hospitals on reservations. This drained job opportunities from reservations and drove an exodus to urban areas such as Los Angeles and Minneapolis. The federal government paid for some vocational training and relocation to cities, but many Native Americans faced a wall of workplace discrimination.53 And it left many reservations depleted. Termination policy ended in the 1970s, but some reservations and tribes did not have their sovereignty restored.
Because the contemporary land power picture has not changed much from fifty years ago, the social picture and racial hierarchy hasn’t changed much either. According to US Census Bureau data from 2018, 25 percent of Native Americans lived in poverty compared with 10 percent for whites.54 Poverty among Native Americans who live on reservations—one-third of the Native American population—is systematically higher than poverty for Native Americans who live outside of reservations.
The persistent racial wealth gap is undergirded in part by barriers to wealth accumulation among Native Americans. Land is at the heart of the problem. The US government remains the legal steward of most tribal lands, and this prevents Native Americans from building wealth in the same way that most Americans can. Trust land status generates intergenerational problems of fractional ownership as families and land claimants grow over time. That dilutes ownership value and complicates decision-making over what to do with land. Government permission is also required in most land use decisions such as leasing, business development, and purchases. The solution is not just land privatization, which faces pushback among Native Americans themselves.55 But there is great dissatisfaction with the current land situation. Native Americans want the opportunity to play a central role in redesigning the system in a way that is much more favorable to them.56
In keeping with large discrepancies in income and wealth between Native Americans and whites, there are also enormous gaps in education and health. Only 24 percent of Native American adults have a college degree, compared with 47 percent of white adults, and there is a similar gap in college enrollments.57 Native Americans die at higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and alcohol- and drug-related causes.58 They have higher rates of mental health problems linked to historical traumas.59
Native American communities also face unique forms of neglect and discrimination within the United States. There is an epidemic of violence against Native American women. Murder is now the third most common cause of death for Native American girls and women through the age of nineteen, and the sixth most common for women in the next age group, twenty to forty-four.60 But law enforcement has systematically neglected to engage the issue seriously, leaving Native American women vulnerable to violence.
Discrimination remains commonplace in the everyday experiences of many Native Americans. One-third of the Native American adults who participated in a recent survey reported discrimination in job applications, consideration for promotion, and wages.61 Nearly 30 percent of the participants reported discrimination in interactions with the police, and 23 percent said they had experienced discrimination when going to a doctor or health clinic.
Indigenous lands and resources continue to be exploited, at times without due consent and consultation. Recent high-profile fights against the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines illustrate widespread discontent among indigenous communities over how corporations hatch and build projects that threaten indigenous lands and tribal cultures. But there is pushback. One enrolled member of the Agua Caliente told me, for instance, that given both their history and their creation story, “we are always looking for who is coming at us, who is presently pushing us, and how do we respond to that.”62
* * *
on a sunny November morning in 2023, the Agua Caliente gathered with other Cahuilla and members of the broader community in a festive celebration to inaugurate a new cultural museum dedicated to telling their story. Located in the heart of downtown Palm Springs, the state-of-the-art museum is the culmination of a dream the Agua Caliente had decades ago. Its design reflects the traditional links to the natural springs and palm-lined canyons of their ancestral lands. At the first turn in the museum, visitors confront how the community has managed to persevere: “Our land and water were stolen, our people decimated by disease, our culture threatened and misunderstood. Determined to survive, we adapted to the new society around us.”
The Agua Caliente started to close the racial wealth gap in the Palm Springs area starting around the 1970s even as many got priced out of living in the downtown area.63 With this shift sprang green shoots for reclaiming elements of the Tribe’s culture, language, and spiritual traditions that land appropriation and reservation policies had sought to stamp out.
The City of Palm Springs had its wings clipped when the State of California intervened in its land battles in the 1960s. A new dawn broke not only for Section 14 but also for the Agua Caliente as a whole. The Tribal Council struck an important land use deal with Palm Springs in the late 1970s that specified Tribal administration of its lands in the city, including Section 14. Land power began to turn again.
The new partnership came to flourish even as some tensions persisted, as shown by the city’s attempt at a land grab in the context of the 1980 fire. The city and the Tribe began cooperating on economic development, benefiting them both. Favorable federal legislation such as the 1987 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act also helped. The Agua Caliente opened a set of casinos that have created revenue streams used to fund broader Tribal economic development, environmental stewardship, cultural regeneration, and educational initiatives. The Agua Caliente have become an economic success case among Native American communities in recent decades. Median income per capita among on-reservation Agua Caliente members is considerably higher than that among other racial groups in the Palm Springs area.64 Regaining control over their land was at the root of this shift.
The Agua Caliente are now trying to use their economic gains to fuel renewed efforts to revitalize weakened elements of their community identity. In addition to building the cultural museum to teach the community and visitors about their history, they have funded archaeological excavations to learn more about their ancestors and have brought in nearby Cahuilla speakers to teach Cahuilla classes, while also supporting the broader Cahuilla community.
But recapturing heritage is not an easy task. Much has been lost, and much work remains. For instance, the Cahuilla language was almost entirely stamped out among the Agua Caliente and there are no known fluent speakers remaining. Their efforts are further complicated by prevailing fraught and racialized interactions between whites and Native Americans across the country and within their community and the state of California.
The Agua Caliente Band is one of many indigenous groups around the globe that have become victims of settler reforms. Time and again land has been a crucial tool in constructing and deepening racial hierarchies that subordinate indigenous groups to colonial populations whose members deem themselves racially superior. Because land is power, and because settler populations took the land, those racial hierarchies remain for generations and leave indelible marks on society.
One of the most effective ways for indigenous groups to recover is to retain and safeguard—and even to grow—what remains of their diminished land base. Hanging on to some portion of their land and its advantages gives them a foothold to rebuild and fight back in a system where land power has been used against them. Still, racial hierarchy—forged and hardened by decades of settler reforms—does not die easily.