Indian Claims Commission

Land was the dominant concern of the litigation by tribes before the Commission. The statutory authority did not permit this tribunal to grant or restore land to the tribes, but only to award money based upon a net acreage figure of lost lands times the monetary market value of an acre at the time of taking. This limitation on the authority of the ICC was resented by many tribal peoples, who wanted the return of their lands more than money—e.g., the Pit River Indians of northern California, and the Teton and Lakota of the Black Hills, South Dakota. In a few instances, by way of settlement acts, tribes gained some monetary funds to buy acreage when they had no communal land (as with the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy of Maine and the Catawba of the Carolinas). Special congressional acts on occasion did restore some acreage, as with the Havasupai at the Grand Canyon. == Research ==

The methodology and theory of ethnohistorical research in general traces back to the work done by anthropologists and other scholars on claims before the Commission.Anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, and legalists were the dominant researchers and advocates for the plaintiff tribes and the defendant federal government. This expanded the amount of anthropological research on these tribes and led to the foundation of the Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference, later the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE). The research and historical reports compiled in evidence for Native American claims was first amassed in 1954 at the inaugural conference. A collection of the studies was published in the series American Indian Ethnohistory by Garland Publishing in 1974. In preparing expert testimony for litigation brought by the tribes as plaintiffs or for the defense by the U.S. government, researchers explored all forms of data, including the earliest possible maps of original title—i.e., native or indigenous—territory and the cartographic presentations based upon treaties, statutes, and executive orders—generally identified as recognized title. In most cases, recognized title lands could be more easily demonstrated in litigation, while native territory depended upon Indian informants, explorers, trappers, military personnel, missionaries and early field ethnographers. Scholars sought to reconstruct native ecology in terms of food supply and other resources of the environment. In this way, some concept of original territory could be gained that could be mapped. As the Final Report of the ICC revealed, compromises over territorial parcels led to rejecting some acreage which had been used by more than one tribe over time. The briefs, testimonies, quantum data, findings, and decisions were published in the 1970s in multiple series of microfiche by Clearwater Publishing Co., now owned by LexisNexis. Garland Publishing, NY, also in the 1970s, published some two hundred books containing some but not all of the materials pertaining to the claims cases. Tribes such as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians of Alabama trace their modern federal status to the efforts of Chief Calvin McGhee and his 1950s work with the Indian Claims Commission. Indian land claims were one of the key reasons the Bureau of Indian Affairs established its administrative Federal Acknowledgment Process in 1978. ==See also==