The Pit River Nation's Land Claim: Treaties Buried for Fifty Years

In eighteen fifty-one and eighteen fifty-two, United States commissioners signed land treaties with California Indian nations, including the Pit River Tribe, whose traditional territory covers approximately three and a half million acres across what are now Shasta, Lassen, Modoc, and Siskiyou counties. The treaties were negotiated and signed.

Then, under pressure from California's congressional delegation, the Senate voted in secret session in eighteen fifty-two against ratifying those treaties, sealing them under an injunction of secrecy. The documents were filed away. They were not published. They effectively did not exist.

For fifty years, the Pit River people occupied a legal status that the United States government had itself created: no conquered people, no treated people, no compensated people. The territory was distributed to settlers and resource-extraction companies anyway. The Pit River people were simply left in the land while the land was taken.

The buried treaties were found in Senate archives in nineteen oh five and published. The legal situation they revealed had been in place for half a century.

In June of nineteen seventy, Pit River Nation members occupied land near Burney that Pacific Gas and Electric Company had been using for geothermal development. They were asserting the same claim their predecessors had asserted in eighteen fifty-one. The occupations resulted in arrests. The campaign they sparked continued for decades.

A note: primary Pit River Nation documentation on the treaty suppression and nineteen seventy occupations is not well represented in publicly accessible archives. The Pit River Tribe's own records are the authoritative source.