Land Displacement & the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians

Kelly Therese Pollock  0:00  
This is Unsung History, the podcast where we discuss people and events in American history that haven't always received a lot of attention. I'm your host, Kelly Therese Pollock. I'll start each episode with a brief introduction to the topic, and then talk to someone who knows a lot more than I do. Be sure to subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app, so you never miss an episode, and please, tell your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, maybe even strangers, to listen too. 1000s of years ago, a Band of Cahuilla, Indians migrated south into the Coachella Valley and the surrounding area. They gathered mesquite seed pods, dates and agave. They hunted small game, and they traded with their neighbors. By the early 1800s, they were growing some crops like corn, pumpkins and melons. The Cahuilla in the area also used the hot springs in what is now the city of Palm Springs as a gathering place for ceremonies and for healing rituals. They called the area Sec-he, meaning boiling water. Because of their location inland from the coast, the Cahuilla of Sec-he avoided the dangers of the Spanish mission system in the 18th century. But after Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government started granting land to ranchers in California. The harsh land of the Sec-he area was not doled out, but an exploratory expedition visited the area, and a lieutenant wrote about it in his diary. In Spanish, the Sec-he or boiling water, was translated as Agua Caliente, or hot water. That's the name by which these people are known to this day. At the same time, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act in 1830, forcefully uprooting Native Americans east of the Mississippi River, and sending them to lands west of the Mississippi, and then moving them further and further west. The Agua Caliente, only a little over 100 miles from the Pacific Ocean, had nowhere west to go, and thus were not forced west, but they were subject to the next step In the American Indian displacement policy, the reservation system. To complicate matters. The United States government, which had just encouraged development of the west by white Americans via the Homestead Act, now wanted railroads to reach across the country to jump start development. The railroads, though, were a new industry and didn't have the capital for that kind of expansion. The government's solution was to grant land to the railroads that they could then sell to raise capital, but rather than large, unbroken tracts of land, the government offered to the railroads land tracts in a checkerboard pattern every other one mile by one mile section, with the government keeping the ones in between. And this land arrangement was not just for the land immediately next to the railroad, but also for a fixed distance on either side of the tracks, usually 10 miles. Unfortunately for the Agua Caliente, the Southern Pacific Railroad went right through the heart of their territory, and their reservation was carved up into a checkered pattern. Agua Caliente children on the reservation, like those on reservations throughout the country, were forced to attend off reservation boarding schools, starting in 1890 where they were taught English and vocational skills in an attempt to forcibly assimilate them into American culture. On February 8, 1887, the United States Congress passed the General Allotment Act, also called the Dawes Act, after its author, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts. The idea of this law was to break up the communally held land of reservations into individual allotments given to members of a tribe who agreed to register with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and who would be encouraged to take up farming. Any unallocated land then could be sold off to people not affiliated with the tribe. Although the allocation of the Agua Caliente land was authorized in 1891, it didn't begin until the 1920s, when hot springs tourism increased the value of the land. The Agua Caliente pushed back, preferring to keep the land held communally as it always had been. But allotment was forced upon them, and some individual members defected from the group. Even when individuals did claim plots of land, though government approval took decades, and the intervention of the United States Supreme Court. In downtown Palm Springs, the checkerboard sections that had been sold by the railroad were white, owned and growing in wealth, with the Agua Caliente sections, especially one known as Section 14, were poor and underdeveloped. There were short term limits to leases on the tribal lands, which discouraged commercial development. And the city of Palm Springs refused to provide utilities to tenants on this land. Legal challenges in 1959 increased the land value, but the city responded by attempting to evict tenants. In 1968, the state of California intervened, with Assistant Attorney General Loren Miller Jr. reporting, "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."  After 1968, the Agua Caliente and the city of Palm Springs began to work together, with the city agreeing to give the tribe administration over its own lands in the city, including in Section 14. The 1988 passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act by the United States Congress allowed the Agua Caliente to open a set of casinos on the tribal lands, which gave them a much needed revenue stream. With that revenue, they have been able to fund archeological excavations and efforts to retain their cultural heritage, including the Cahuilla language. The UNESCO World Atlas of Languages rates Cahuilla as critically endangered, with only 99 speakers of the language, lending urgency to the ongoing Agua Caliente Cahuilla Language Revitalization Program. Today, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians is a federally recognized Native American tribe. According to their website, they have more than 500 members and are stewards to more than 34,000 acres of ancestral land. In autumn, 2023, the Agua Caliente Band opened the Smithsonian affiliated Agua Caliente Cultural Museum in downtown Palm Springs to tell their story.

Joining me in this episode is Dr. Michael Albertus, Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and author of, "Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn't, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies."

Hi, Mike, thanks so much for joining me.

Dr. Michael Albertus  11:02  
 Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. 

Kelly Therese Pollock  11:04  
Yeah. So I want to start with asking you, I think my listeners have a pretty good sense of what a historian does at this point, but they might not know as much about what a political scientist does. I've never had a political scientist on the show, so I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about generally what political science is, and specifically what, what sort of political science you do? 

Dr. Michael Albertus  11:25  
Sure thing. So political science is, you know, the study of politics, really. It's a social science. So like other social sciences, it's involved in developing theories about how we understand politics, and, you know, falsifiable theories, and testing those theories against data in the real world. There are different stripes of political science. I'm in comparative politics, which, for all intents and purposes, is basically politics of countries other than United States. There's a there's a broader answer, but in short, that's what it's about. I do a lot of work in Latin America, but also Europe and and this book, "Land Power," that we'll be chatting about brought has brought me to other places as well, you know, South Africa, East Asia, and the like. And so a lot of my work is sort of statistical. You know, there's a lot of gathering big data, testing hypotheses. But you know, this book is a bit of a different take. So you know, one thing I love about comparative politics is oftentimes, we're trying to test hypotheses and bring big data to interesting questions around the world, but you also have to have a sense of place in order to do that appropriately. And as a result, that often entails field work, going to places, talking to people at many different levels, you know, in government, on the street, etc, and and learning about places. And that this book brought me in into close contact with people around the world to talk about issues of land. So, so that's kind of generally what comparative politics, political science is about, and a little bit on the work I do. I do work, you know, not only on land related issues, but also on democracy and dictatorship, on inequality and redistribution, civil conflict, and the like.

Kelly Therese Pollock  13:17  
So, what made you decide to write this particular book, then? You've written several other books. And I have always had the sense that comparative politics was usually comparing, you know, maybe two or three case studies. This book has, I lost count of the number of case studies in this book. So what was sort of the, the driving impetus behind writing this book?

Dr. Michael Albertus  13:42  
So, in many ways, I've been working on this book since my dissertation at Stanford about 15 years ago. And, you know, I started at the time working on individual projects in which I was, you know, going to places in Latin America, initially, you know, spending time in Peru and Bolivia and Venezuela and Colombia, and looking at questions about major programs that have reallocated land in the last 50 or 75 years in those countries, and how that impacted people in different ways, how that impacted economies, how that impacted politics, how land was doled out, et cetera. And that led me, over time, to start to think about a bigger, broader story, because I started to see parallels in different places. And as I was traveling elsewhere around the world to places like Ireland or Italy or China, I started to see actually, that all these countries as well have gone through major reshufflings in land ownership over the course of the last 100 or 100 plus years. And so I started to see that there was a bigger, broader story here. And I also started to see and recognize that land still plays such a central role in in these countries and in the structure of society in these countries. It's hard to understand different forms of inequality, identity, relationships to politics, the economy and the like, without understanding the history of what's happened on the land in these places. And you know, I came across time and time again, individuals who told me stories about how deeply land has impacted them. And so, you know, in a place like Peru, it felt like everybody, you know, many people are still on the land, and other people are one step away from it. You know, maybe they just recently left rural areas and came to urban ones, but they still go back all the time. Or they straddle the urban rural space, where they have a history that's rooted in land for why they're in urban spaces, and again, that's repeated again and again. And so I felt like I wanted to tell I realized that story, and I also realized that essentially, every country on earth has engaged in these big reshuffles of land in the last 200 years, through what I call the "great reshuffle" in the book, and many countries are still engaged in it. And in order to get it right, and think about how we can make a better society in places around the globe, we have to learn from from the past as well. And so that's that's what inspired the book.

Kelly Therese Pollock  16:15  
One of the stories you talk about in the book is the the Agua Caliente. So this is in what is now California, and one of the things that's so interesting about this group is that really all of the things we see Native Americans go through vis a vis the US government happened to them. They're sort of a microcosm of of everything that you see happening to various Native American tribes throughout the US, but in some ways, their story starts out at least very differently than a lot of Native American tribes in the US. So could you talk a little bit about sort of the their first contact with Europeans, for instance, is, is very different, and they they're not part of the relocation to the the west that so many native tribes go through because of where they're situated.

Dr. Michael Albertus  17:05  
Right. So, you know, being situated in Southern California meant that, you know, they avoided the earlier parts of colonial settlement in on the eastern seaboard of the United States. And, you know, settlement didn't go to the west, really, until after the Mexican American War, you know, starting around, around the 1850s, 1849, and as a result, they didn't face the sort of forced removals that were experienced in the east coast and the south and the like. And you know, that was, you know, the there are many episodes of that. I'm sure listeners are familiar with, with many of those episodes. But you know, as when, when the US received or or obtained this, acquired this large chunk of territory from Mexico, all of a sudden, you know, pushing Native Americans further west became untenable. There was no where else to go, and so a new policy of reservations sprang up, and that's, you know, what, what Agua Caliente would ultimately be slotted into. But they also, interestingly enough, avoided, for the most part, you know, significant impacts from Spanish colonial settlement that came through Mexico and the Spanish missions that crept up the coast of California. They were a bit further inland in California, in a place that was not as you know, it was not as much on the beaten track at that point. And so it seems like, from the records, like there was perhaps a little bit of early contact, perhaps in the 1800s or something, but very, very little, very minimal. There's no significant evidence of sustained contact until, really, the the Gold Rush and the post Mexican American War period, at which point settlers started creeping west from from the eastern seaboard in the United States.

Kelly Therese Pollock  19:01  
Yeah. And so then this is just a fascinating part of the story, when the the railroad is coming into this area, and I hadn't heard about this checkerboarding. The the US decides the the railroad needs to come in, we need to be able to get people to the west. And the railroad, of course, is is new and poor and can't necessarily afford to to do all this on their own, and so the US says, "Okay, well, we'll give you some land, and, you know, you can sell off the land, and that's how you the the railroad can make money to do this," but does it in a really bizarre way. I don't, don't understand who decided this was a good idea. But can you please explain what this checkerboarding is and how and the effect that it had on the Agua Caliente, which is just really devastating?

Dr. Michael Albertus  19:49  
Right. Yes, it was ultimately very deeply disruptive. So, so checkerboarding, as you said, was born of this problem that railroad companies were in their infancy, you know, in the 1860s, 1870s, and as a result, they had very little capital to lay track. And so the federal government, to endow them with capital granted them every other square mile of public land alongside the tracks that they were laying, usually within about 10 miles on either side of the tracks. And so everywhere that railroads went, these checkerboard patterns followed them. And then, you know, by dint of fate, the Agua Caliente, you know, and the broader Cahuilla were in the crosshairs of the Southern Pacific Railway. And so in the 18, you know, 70s, the federal when the federal government created their reservation, they gave every other square mile to the railroad, and then the opposite square miles became the checkerboard pattern of the reservation, which it's it maintains that checkerboard pattern today. And if you look at it, and you know, there's a map of this in the in the book, it sort of immediately hits you as how sort of farcical it is almost, how outlandish it is to try and create what should be conceptually kind of a cohesive unit or territorial area, to literally carve it up into a checkerboard pattern makes it very difficult for to create anything like coherent land use patterns, or, you know, have relationships to the land that are coherent over time, and that sort of thing. And that's exactly what happened, not only to the Agua Caliente Band, but also to several other Cahuilla bands.

Kelly Therese Pollock  21:34  
Another really striking thing that is not just in this case study, but is in several times that you talk about indigenous people and their their approach to the land, and then as you talk about the great shuffle, is this idea that that land is held communally. And then when there's land reallocation, that that is often there is, you know, like a government force or somebody else thinking that no land should be individually allocated. That, of course, happens not just to the Agua Caliente, but across the United States when the Dawes Act is passed. Could you talk a little bit about in this particular case, but just in general, how this plays out in these reshuffles?

Dr. Michael Albertus  22:23  
Right. So there was, you know, prior to the establishment of the United States and what is now the territory of the United States, there was nothing like modern conceptual conceptualizations of private property as individual private property to specific plots of land, you know, that was alienable, excludable and the like. And that was certainly true amongst the Agua Caliente. So land was held communally by the by the tribe as a whole. And but there was an effort by the United States to try and break up, you know, tribal land holdings across the country, and to privatize land by assigning it to individual Native American families. And you know, that was part of the Dawes Act. That was the attempt by the Dawes Act to try and assimilate, assimilate Native Americans into, you know, American economic institutions and the like. The Dawes Act didn't ultimately apply to every single reservation. It was rolled out piecemeal to different reservations over time. And in the case of the Agua Caliente, it actually didn't come until the 1920s. So despite the fact that, you know, Bureau of Indian Affairs agent was running, you know, governing the reservation for several decades after its creation, there was not an attempt at allotment until land became attractive and valuable for the purposes of tourism, namely, in what is now downtown Palm Springs, and around particularly the hot springs, which was the the main attraction in the area. And so surveyors and land allotment officials came from the federal government to start allotting land within the within the reservation. And the idea behind the Dawes Act, or one of the practices under the Dawes Act was okay, you would allot land to individual members, tribal members, and then any land that was left unallotted, but at the point at which everyone had already an allotment, could be sold off. And you know that ultimately, that ultimately sold off about 100 million acres of land that was within the creation of reservations. And ultimately, it took about 30 years, and ultimately, the Agua Caliente were able to avoid that particular fate of losing additional land through land allotment, but it in many ways caused tensions that were within the tribe, and within different clans of the tribe, within different individual members of the tribe, because what happened was that some people started taking up the federal government on land allotment and pursuing allotments, whereas others did not want to pursue allotments, or or, or thought that it was detrimental to the tribes, you know, the tribe's coherence as a as a whole. And so it generated, you know, within within tribe conflict that simmered in many ways, and that ultimately had to be hashed out in court battles that went all the way up to the Supreme Court and and back down and back up again to the Supreme Court and and ultimately it was resolved by not until the late 1950s after the Dawes Act had already ended. But it was this interventionist policy that sought to crack open reservations to these outside forces of land privatization and ultimately further land dispossession.

Kelly Therese Pollock  25:56  
So you mentioned earlier that one of the things you did in researching for this book was talking to actual people, and that is true in this case study in particular. You talked to people among the Agua Caliente. Could you talk a little bit about what they say about this past, how it affects their current situation? And and I always like to remind people, when we talk about Native American groups, that they are still here, that this is not just history. And so what is the the present of the Agua Caliente? 

Dr. Michael Albertus  26:32  
Of course, they're still here. There are, you know, a couple of couple million Native Americans now around the US and and many of them still have vibrant cultural traditions, are rooted to lands and territories, and, you know, still engage in a variety of traditional practices as well. But, but also, you know, they, they are very much present, just like you and I are present and engage in all forms, or most forms of modernity, right? So that's certainly true of the Agua Caliente as well. They're now, you know, very, a very engaged tribe. They're very sophisticated in terms of how they work with the city of Palm Springs now, when it comes to land management, development and that sort of thing, and they have used they've actually done fairly well after, you know, these many, many decades of land battles. You know, we didn't talk about it much, but there were, there were a series of land battles with the city of Palm Springs after they finally resolved the allotment issue, and after they were able to extend leases, the lease duration on lands within the reservation, which increased the attractiveness of their land for business. And as a result, the city of Palm Springs was trying to remove, you know, low income tenants and people who were renting for short periods of time within downtown Palm Springs, and instead locate business there. And, and that, you know, there was, there was a battle over that, you know, and, and eventually that got so ugly that the state of California intervened. And eventually the city struck a land use deal with the tribe, and which gave them a lot more autonomy over how to manage their own land. And they came to a detente with the city, and they started cooperating with the city. And it hasn't been perfect in every way, for sure, but there, but there have been a lot of advances, and as a result, they have done things. There was also a gaming act, a Federal Gaming Act in 1987 that enabled them to set up casinos. They've set up a cultural museum and and several other things that have drawn revenue into the tribe that they have used to revitalize their you know, their traditions to investigate more their past through archeological digs to try and bring in, you know, members from other Cahuilla bands in the area, to teach Cahuilla language to members of the tribe, young members of the of the tribe. And so they're, you know, they're, they're modern, they're, they're just like you and I, but they have a very different past than you and I that is rooted in this land dispossession. And I think what's so fascinating is that people are very, very attuned to their own history. They understand the consequences of these attempted and successful land grabs as they've occurred again and again and again on their territory, and they are still living with the consequences. You know, one of the, one of the downsides, the many, many downsides of these policies, is that, you know, they were, they were effective in many ways, and they did break down, you know, certain relationships within the tribe and the ability even of tribal members to afford to live within the reservation itself because of development that ultimately occurred. And so many of them live off reservation or are distributed out in different, you know, in different in different towns, and some cases even different states. But, but they do all share this deep history and a recognition of what what binds them together. And and folks were very warm in sharing that with me and sharing some of their own personal histories for how, how their own family lives have been impacted by these twists and turns in in policies on the land.

Kelly Therese Pollock  30:40  
In the last section of your book, you talk about ways that land allocation can be used to right past wrongs. So we've been talking about the kinds of ways that land allocation has been used to commit wrongs, but it can go in reverse. It takes political will and political desire to do that, but it can be done. Could you talk about some of the ways that that can happen when, in fact, people want to, want to correct these wrongs?

Dr. Michael Albertus  31:13  
Sure, it's happening in many different ways, in places around the globe, and I think, in ways that we can learn from in the United States. There are different types of land reshuffles that I talk about in the book. And you know, some are in the deep past. Others are in the more recent past. And you know that the nature of land reshuffling, in some ways, shapes the remedies that are most that are most suitable to any given case. But in this particular case, if we think about, you know, indigenous dispossession, there are examples of land restitution that are going on in countries like South Africa or in Australia. There are also a lot of examples of the co- management, or co- stewardship of land with, you know, between government and indigenous communities that were just displaced from the land, previously in Australia, in Canada, again in South Africa. There are other examples as well, and those provide a blueprint, in some ways, for how to draw back in communities in terms of having a more direct connection to the to the to the land that they were previously dispossessed from, and provides, you know, a potential path forward for thinking about how to, you know, vest longer term interests in that land amongst our indigenous communities, and also potentially to share revenues that are generated on those lands that can again be channeled back into tribal membership and the like, and the reconstitution of frayed community life. So though, so those are ways, you know, those are a couple ways in which land is being used right now. There are other ways as well that are related, you know, not simply to dispossession, but also to things like environmental degradation that's occurred through, you know, through land policies, as well as writing other issues that have transpired in the course of land reshuffles, like the fact that most reshuffles of land have granted the vast majority of land to men, as opposed to women, and so some countries are trying to rectify that as well through current land policies.

Kelly Therese Pollock  33:28  
You say in the book that you see another reshuffle coming. I think a lot of people, especially who live in urban areas in the US, probably don't think that much about land, and sort of don't necessarily equate land with power. Maybe they think, "Oh, that's a thing in the past, but not a thing in the present." So could you talk some about why you see another reshuffle coming, and why you still see this connection between land and power moving forward?

Dr. Michael Albertus  33:55  
Sure thing. And it's a great question, and I should say maybe to preface it, that land, just because there's a trend towards urbanization, doesn't mean that land, you know, land policy, land politics, is not important in urban spaces. I think it's impossible to understand the current housing crisis in the United States without understanding the problems of land access that are, that are rooted in, you know, in policies and past policies, and in some ways they reflect, you know, attempts to keep certain people off the land within urban spaces. You know, attempts at segregation through, you know, zoning restrictions and nimbyism, redlining and the like. Those are all types of land, land related outcomes in urban spaces that shape the very you know, block by block experiences that people have in urban spaces and in when it comes to the future of the great reshuffle and the future of humans on the land, I think that there are a couple of trends that are really important to keep in mind that are going to drive a lot of this in coming decades. One of those trends is population growth, and then a peak in population and a rapid decline, actually. So you know, human populations are anticipated to grow from currently 8 billion to 10 billion by about 2080 or so, at which point they'll not not plateau, but rather start to crater. And you know, as as declining fertility and birth rates spread across the world. That's already happening in a lot of developed economies, but it's going to it's spreading to to developing economies as well. And so what that's going to do is it's going to drive down global population relatively fast, so that we are going to retrace relatively quickly 8 billion and then go substantially below it, to five to three to two. It's not clear how far that will go, but it's pretty safe to say that by the year 2200 there's going to be substantially fewer people on Earth than there are today. That has huge implications for how we think about relating to the land, not only in rural spaces, but also in urban spaces. Think about cities shrinking around the world, that's a pretty profound thing to think about, and is going to take a real shift in terms of mindsets for what cities should look like. There's a second trend in development, which is climate change, that's, I'm going to be a major driver of all this, and that is going to shift where people live on Earth as well, because it's going to make a lot of land that's currently kind of becoming less attractive and less habitable, less agriculturally productive, and hotter, places like the American Southwest, or the, you know, African Sahel, or Northeastern Brazil, it's going to make those more difficult places to live, and it's going to make other places more attractive, places to live that are currently not so attractive, or that are that are more difficult or sparsely populated to live in, right? So, you know, Canadian expanses of permafrost right now are going to become agriculturally productive by 2080. Maybe 4 million pretty you know, predictions are that about 4 million acres of additional land, which is a vast amount of land, is going to be opened up in the Canadian, you know, as new kind of Canadian Prairies, and that will probably be farmed agriculturally and the same amount of land in Russia. So, so there's going to be a relocation of people as well. You know, of course, sea rise, sea levels are rising at the same time, there's a disproportionately large number of people who live in proximity to the ocean. Those people are going to be pushed to higher ground, into more northern  climates, generally speaking. And so there's going to be another reshuffle on on the land, both domestically, where people, where people reside on the land within countries, but also international migration is going to pick up. And some countries, like Canada are already, already have plans for how they're going to try and accommodate and attract migrants in order to try and take advantage of some of these changes moving forward. But there are going to be major changes in the coming decades.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:03  
All right? Well, I think that's a good sales pitch for your book. So can you please tell listeners how they can get a copy of your book?

Dr. Michael Albertus  38:11  
Sure thing, it's available as a hardcover, an audible, as an ebook and Kindle and the like, through Amazon, through Basic Books and other, Barnes and Noble, and other major book retailers, as well as hopefully your local bookstore. And if it's not at your local bookstore, ask them to order it.

Kelly Therese Pollock  38:29  
Mike, thank you so much for speaking with me. It was a real pleasure. 

Dr. Michael Albertus  38:33  
Yeah, likewise, thanks for having me on the show.

Teddy  39:18  
Thanks for listening to Unsung History. Please subscribe to Unsung History on your favorite podcasting app. You can find the sources used for this episode and a full episode transcript @UnsungHistorypodcast.com. To the best of our knowledge, all audio and images used by Unsung History are in the public domain or are used with permission. You can find us on Twitter or Instagram @Unsung__History, or on Facebook @UnsungHistorypodcast. To contact us with questions, corrections, praise, or episode  suggestions, please email kelly@UnsungHistorypodcast.com. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate, review, and tell everyone you know. Bye!