The Klamath River is a 257-mile (414 km) long river in southern Oregon and northern California. Beginning near Klamath Falls in the Oregon high desert, it flows west through the Cascade Range and Klamath Mountains before reaching the temperate rainforest of California's North Coast, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. The Klamath River is the third-largest salmon and steelhead producing river on the west coast of the contiguous United States. The river's watershed – the Klamath Basin – encompasses more than 15,000 square miles (39,000 km2), and is known for its biodiverse forests, large areas of designated wilderness, and freshwater marshes that provide key migratory bird habitat.
The Hupa are a Native American people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group in northwestern California. Their endonym is dining’xine:wh for Hupa-language speakers in general, and na:tinixwe for residents of Hoopa Valley, also spelled Natinook-wa, meaning "People of the Place Where the Trails Return". The Karuk name for them is Kishákeevar / Kishakeevra. The majority of the tribe is enrolled in the federally recognized Hoopa Valley Tribe.
The Guidiville Rancheria of California are a federally recognized Pomo tribe located in Mendocino County, California.
The Tolowa people or Taa-laa-wa Dee-ni’ are a Native American people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethno-linguistic group. Two rancherías still reside in their traditional territory in northwestern California. Those removed to the Siletz Reservation in Oregon are located there.
The Yurok Indian Reservation is a Native American reservation for the Yurok people located in parts of Del Norte and Humboldt counties, California, on a 44-mile (71 km) stretch of the Klamath River. It is one of a very few tribes who have never been removed from their ancestral lands in California.
The Yurok people are an Algic-speaking Indigenous people of California that has existed along the Hehlkeek 'We-Roy or "Health-kick-wer-roy" and on the Pacific coast, from Trinidad south of the river’s mouth almost to Crescent City along the north coast.
The Klamath Tribes, formerly the Klamath Indian Tribe of Oregon, are a federally recognized Native American Nation consisting of three Native American tribes who traditionally inhabited Southern Oregon and Northern California in the United States: the Klamath, Modoc, and Yahooskin. The tribal government is based in Chiloquin, Oregon.
The United Auburn Indian Community (UAIC) is a federally recognized Native America tribe consisting mostly of Miwok Indians indigenous to the Sacramento Valley region.
Indian termination describes United States policies relating to Native Americans from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s. It was shaped by a series of laws and practices with the intent of assimilating Native Americans into mainstream American society. Cultural assimilation of Native Americans was not new; the belief that indigenous people should abandon their traditional lives and become what the government considered "civilized" had been the basis of policy for centuries. What was new, however, was the sense of urgency that, with or without consent, tribes must be terminated and begin to live "as Americans." To that end, Congress set about ending the special relationship between tribes and the federal government.
United States v. Kagama, 118 U.S. 375 (1886), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of the Major Crimes Act of 1885. This Congressional act gave the federal courts jurisdiction in certain Indian-on-Indian crimes, even if they were committed on an Indian reservation. Kagama, a Yurok Native American (Indian) accused of murder, was selected as a test case by the Department of Justice to test the constitutionality of the Act.
The Cloverdale Rancheria of Pomo Indians of California is a federally recognized tribe of Pomo Indians in California. The tribe is currently considered "landless", as they do not have any land that is in Federal Trust. In 2008 they acquired approximately 80 acres (32 ha) of property on the southern end of Cloverdale, California. The property is currently going through the Fee to Trust process to become the tribe's landbase.
Menominee Tribe v. United States, 391 U.S. 404 (1968), is a case in which the Supreme Court ruled that the Menominee Indian Tribe kept their historical hunting and fishing rights even after the federal government ceased to recognize the tribe. It was a landmark decision in Native American case law.
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife v. Klamath Indian Tribe, 473 U.S. 753 (1985), was a case appealed to the US Supreme Court by the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The Supreme Court reversed the previous decisions in the District Court and the Court of Appeals stating that the exclusive right to hunt, fish, and gather roots, berries, and seeds on the lands reserved to the Klamath Tribe by the 1864 Treaty was not intended to survive as a special right to be free of state regulation in the ceded lands that were outside the reservation after the 1901 Agreement.
The Cher-Ae Heights Indian Community of the Trinidad Rancheria is a federally recognized tribe with members who are descendants of Chetco, Hupa, Karuk, Tolowa, Wiyot, and Yurok people in Humboldt County, California. As of the 2010 Census the population was 132.
The Klamath Termination Act was a 1953 law under the US Indian termination policy. The Klamath tribe along with the Flathead, Menominee, Potawatomi, and Turtle Mountain Chippewa, as well as all tribes in the states of California, New York, Florida, and Texas were targeted for immediate termination by House Concurrent Resolution 108 of 1953. The statement which was issued 1 August 1953 by the United States Congress announced the official beginning of the federal Indian termination policy. The tribes that were listed as being ready for immediate termination had been placed on a list prepared by acting Commissioner of Indian Affairs, William Zimmerman, because they met four primary criteria: adequate resources, they had adopted to a certain degree the cultural traits of the larger American culture, they were willing to terminate federal trust obligations, and the state was willing to assume jurisdiction over their criminal and civil matters.
Between 1851 and 1852, the United States Army forced California's tribes to sign 18 treaties that relinquished each tribe's rights to their traditional lands in exchange for reservations. Due to pressure from California representatives, the Senate repudiated the treaties and ordered them to remain secret. In 1896 the Bureau of American Ethnology report on major native American Indian interactions with the United States Government was the first time the treaties were made public. The report, Indian Land Cessions in the United States (book), compiled by Charles C. Royce, includes the 18 lost treaties between the state's tribes and a map of the reservations. Below is the California segment of the report listing the treaties. The full report covered all 48 states' tribal interactions nationwide with the U.S. government.
Mattz v. Arnett was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the land that had been the Klamath River Reservation and was incorporated into the Hoopa Valley Reservation in 1891 remained Indian country within the meaning of 18 U.S.C. §1151 despite the Act of June 17, 1892. The holding required California game wardens to return of five gill nets because the land was within the reservation boundaries and California lacked jurisdiction to enforce California law that interfered with rights reserved by the Yurok Tribe.
On October 31, 1988, “An Act to partition certain reservation lands between the Hoopa Valley Tribe and the Yurok Tribe, to clarify the use of tribal timber proceeds, and for other purposes” was enacted by 1st Session of the 100th Congress of 1988, after being introduced by U.S. Senator for California Alan MacGregor Cranston as S. 2723. The Hoopa-Yurok Settlement Act (“HYSA”) provided an administrative alternative to the improvised methods the BIA was forced to adopt after the 1973 rulings recognized the continuing status of the Yurok Reservation and the BIA's failure to treat the Yurok Tribe appropriately. When the U.S. Congress partitioned the former joint reservation into the Yurok Reservation and the Hoopa Valley Reservation, it explicitly divorced the Resighini Rancheria from all rights and resources of the Yurok Tribe and the restored Yurok Reservation unless the Rancheria voted to extinguish their separate and distinct tribe and reservation by joining the Yurok Tribe.
