1.5¢
an acre a year: the rent for the whole 240,000-acre Pyramid Lake Reservation, leased to sheepmen in 1919. The Indian Office set the rent and used the money to pay its own staff.
What it's worth
The price they were offered, and what the land was worth.
For more than a century, the people who held the land were paid a fraction of its value, and the buyers' own records say so. The gap is the extraction. Closing it is our work.
The record, 1882 to 1921
Offered pennies, worth dollars.
Price per acre offered to the people who held the land, against what the land was worth by the buyer's own figures or the government's own price. Each row is sourced to the page.
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Great Sioux Reservation, 1882
About 10¢ an acre in cattle for 9 to 10 million acres. The Senate committee sent to check the deal put half of it at $1.25 an acre, the government's own minimum price, and noted that railroads were paying $5 an acre for rights of way across it.
10¢ $1.25 $5 rail -
Great Sioux Reservation, 1889
About 11 million acres sold to settlers for the Sioux. They received about 57¢ an acre. Their delegates had asked $1.25, “just what the Government sells its land for”.
57¢ $1.25 -
Pyramid Lake Reservation, Nevada, 1921
River bottomland held by squatters, who admitted under oath that they knew it was reservation land. The inspector recommended selling it to them for about $10 an acre, though some of it was worth $150 or more. Most never paid.
$10 $150+
$20,000
in cattle offered in 1891 for 18,700 acres at the south end of Pyramid Lake: less than the squatters made from that land in two years. Congress never ratified it.
$0
for California's eighteen treaties of 1851–52. The tribes gave up their land for 7.5 million acres of reservations, which the state legislature valued at over $100 million. The Senate rejected the treaties in secret.
The full history, told from the sources: wovoka.org (opens in a new tab) Whose land was this? (opens in a new tab)
Our reading
The gap came from three missing tools.
The losses were not inevitable. The record shows who held title, who could raise money against the land, and who could go to court. The people who held the land had none of the three.
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Title they controlled
Reservation land was held in federal trust. Until 1934 the government could lease or sell it without the owners' consent.
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Access to capital
Trust land could not be pledged as collateral, so the owners could not borrow to develop it. They leased it out cheaply instead.
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Counsel of their own
Before 1934 the tribe at Pyramid Lake could not hire its own lawyer. Its trustee also represented the irrigation project taking its water.
When Pyramid Lake got the tools, it started winning. Once it had its own council, from 1936, the tribe set its own leases, at market rates and with bonds. It won back squatted land, built an 800-head cattle herd and a hatchery raising about a million fish a year, won its case against the Secretary of the Interior in 1972 and an $8 million award for lost water in 1975.
Our reading
The same gap, in carbon, water and canopy.
We lost the 19th century to extraction. We can't afford to lose the 21st. Today the contest is over what restored land produces beyond the harvest: carbon, clean water, coastal protection and habitat.
A smallholder farming coffee under shade trees is paid for the coffee. The canopy above it holds carbon, keeps water in the soil and shelters wildlife, and none of that is paid for. A family that sells raw cherry instead of processed coffee leaves more of the value with the buyer.
Our work is to help communities find out what their land is worth, and to put the three tools in their hands: secure tenure, finance, and advice that answers to them.
Our reading
The new lease takes its cut first.
In 2024 we were offered a carbon deal that took $32.50 of every $100 before a single cost, for forty years, in return for $30,000. We read it with the communities and said no.
Sources
- Great Sioux Reservation, 1882. US Senate, Report of the Select Committee to Examine into the Condition of the Sioux and Crow Indians, S. Rept. 283, 48th Cong., 1st sess. (1884), pp. VIII–IX: $925,000 in cows and bulls offered; half the land “could be rapidly sold … at $1.25 an acre”; railroads at $5 an acre. Read the report · In wovoka.org's library
- Great Sioux Reservation, 1888–89. Jeffrey Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism (Cambridge, 2004), p. 228 (the delegates' $1.25, “just what the Government sells its land for”) and p. 231 (about 57¢ an acre received). The delegates' written demand, and Pratt at Standing Rock on 27 July 1888: US Senate, S. Ex. Doc. 17, 50th Cong., 2nd sess. (1888), pp. 248 and 80. In wovoka.org's library
- Pyramid Lake, 1891, 1919 and 1921, and the turn after 1934. Martha C. Knack and Omer C. Stewart, As Long as the River Shall Run (University of California Press, 1984): the 1891 offer pp. 194–197; the 1919 lease pp. 154–155; the 1921 sale pp. 221–223; trust, collateral and counsel p. 344; leases, herd and hatchery pp. 326–330; land won back p. 252; Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe v. Morton (1972) pp. 336–337; the 1975 award p. 337. Borrow the book · In wovoka.org's library
- California, 1851–52. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide (Yale, 2016), the eighteen treaties and the legislature's valuation. In wovoka.org's library
The history is the sources'. The sections marked “Our reading” are Wovoka's view of what it means.