KVIG Informative

The nearly 26.5 million acres the federal government said it took from the Southern Paiute people in 1860 stretched across southwestern Utah, southeastern Nevada and part of California, ground that today holds Las Vegas and dozens of other cities. The government never returned an acre of it. More than a century later, it paid cash instead, a settlement model federal Indian claims policy has repeated ever since.

An Act of Congress approved Oct. 17, 1968, authorized the distribution of a $7,253,165.19 judgment the Indian Claims Commission had awarded the Southern Paiute Nation of Indians, according to a Bureau of Indian Affairs press release dated Jan. 24, 1969. The release states that the judgment covered an area of almost 26.5 million acres in southwestern Utah, southeastern Nevada and an adjacent portion of California, land the release says was taken from the Southern Paiutes in 1860.

Congress had appropriated the money to pay the award on April 30, 1965, more than three years before lawmakers passed the 1968 act directing how the funds would reach individual claimants, according to the same release. The release set eligibility at Oct. 17, 1968: a claimant had to have been born on or before that date and still living on it, with ancestry established through the rolls of the Kaibab, Moapa, Shivwits, Kanosh, Koosharem, Indian Peaks, Cedar City and Las Vegas Bands, or through other documentation the Secretary of the Interior found satisfactory, the release states.

Donate

Donate

The Bureau of Indian Affairs directed applicants to send their paperwork to its Area Director’s office at P.O. Box 7007 in Phoenix, with a postmark deadline of June 30, 1969, according to the release.

The Southern Paiute award was not the only Nevada-related Indian Claims Commission judgment moving through Washington that decade. A separate Bureau of Indian Affairs release dated Aug. 9, 1965, recommended legislation to distribute a $3,650,000 judgment for a case the release identifies as Docket No. 87, covering what it calls the Snake Tract in Oregon, Nevada and California, to a distinct roll of Northern Paiutes. That release specifically excluded the Walpapi, Yahooskin, Bannock and Western Mono groups from the distribution, underscoring how narrowly the federal claims process drew the line around who could collect and for what specific tract.

Donate

Donate

Neither release describes any return of land. The 1969 release is explicit that the Southern Paiute payment moved as a per-capita distribution of money from the judgment fund, available only to individuals who could document descent from one of the eight named bands or otherwise satisfy the Interior Department, not as compensation in land or in any other form.

The claims process closed the legal case, but it did not change who held the land. Fifty-seven years later, the Moapa and Las Vegas Bands named on that 1969 roll remain tied to a judgment that measured their loss in dollars, on land that had already been counted, sold and built into a city, with none of it transferred back.