California offers $100 million for tribes to buy back their land. It won’t go far.
When he was 10 years old, Terry Supahan’s mom bought him a new bike. Supahan, a member of the Karuk Tribe in Northern California, had only ridden second hand bikes before. A hundred years earlier, the state of California had stolen millions of acres of land from his tribe and more than a hundred others. In 1968, the state sent checks to individual Indigenous people to pay them back. Supahan’s mom used the money she received — about $ 100 he recalls — to buy the bike, a moment that Supahan remembers fondly, but laughs at now. How could a bicycle compare to millions of acres of stolen land?
The check was part of a $ 29 million land settlement for roughly 65 million acres of land — two-thirds of the entire state — stolen from Indigenous people. That works …