The slogan is simple, the sentiment sweeping: "No one is illegal on stolen land." It festoons placards, hashtags, and classroom walls from Sacramento to Santa Cruz. But as with most slogans meant to end debate, this one also seeks to preclude history. It presumes that California was once peaceful, indivisible, and unjustly snatched from its rightful stewards. But history, and a robust respect for indigenous agency, tells a far more complex story, one in which conquest, conflict, diplomacy, and trade all played a part. To claim that the land was "stolen" and never rightfully acquired is not only historically inaccurate, it infantilizes the very indigenous groups it purports to defend.
California, contrary to modern myth, was never a harmonious Eden of united tribes singing songs of peace until the Spanish came ashore. The truth is that for over 12,000 years, more than 500 tribal societies occupied the region, often in brutal competition. These tribes warred incessantly over territory, trade routes, slaves, and honor. The Haida and Tlingit, although northern, share cultural practices that echoed throughout the West: the capture of slaves, the killing of rivals, the assimilation or extermination of the weak. Entire tribes were wiped from existence. Lands changed hands not once but dozens of times, often through bloodshed.
By the time Spanish missionaries arrived in the late 1700s, the number of distinct tribes had already plummeted. Epidemic disease, internecine warfare, and resource exhaustion had reduced the original 500-plus tribal entities to fewer than 100. This attrition wasn’t the result of colonial intervention but of indigenous struggle itself. The myth of the peaceful native collapses under the weight of archeological and ethnographic evidence. Tribal societies in California, like in the East, exhibited the full spectrum of human behavior: noble and cruel, artistic and violent.
Spain held California for 52 years. Mexico claimed it next, for a meager 27. Neither power treated the land as eternally sacred tribal territory. Nor did any surviving tribal leaders challenge their sovereignty in the language of permanent stewardship. When the United States acquired California in 1848 as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, it did so not by force but by payment: $15 million in cash and $3.25 million in assumed debt. This was not theft, it was a transaction recognized under international law.
The real moment of moral scrutiny came not with the acquisition, but with the American decision to negotiate directly with the tribes. Between 1851 and 1852, the US signed 18 treaties with the remaining major tribal entities, including the Luiseño, Cahuilla, Serrano, and Diegueño. These tribes voluntarily ceded vast territories in exchange for designated reservation lands, livestock, food, and goods. The Treaty with the Dieguino, for instance, exchanged lands for 1,800 head of beef cattle, blankets, and clothing. Critics call these treaties unjust, but if one argues the tribes were too weak or simple to make such agreements, one strips them of their dignity, their rationality, and their sovereignty.
Were these treaties honored? Some were, some weren’t. The US Senate, bowing to political pressure kept them secret for years. But despite this reality, almost all tribes retained occupancy on designated lands. By the mid-20th century, the federal government attempted to correct these injustices through the Rancheria Act of 1958, which granted property rights to approximately 3,000 California Indians, roughly 15 percent of the state’s indigenous population. These lands were not merely symbolic. They were tangible assets, capable of development, sale, and economic growth.