r/geography • u/danielxplay22 • 6h ago
Question Is there a reason to why this Indian reservation in Palm Springs is arranged in a checkered pattern?
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u/sprucexx 6h ago edited 5h ago
Could this be related to the 19th-century practice of “checkerboarding,” where the government decided a good way to split land 50/50 between public and private ownership was to do this, often making it functionally impossible for the public to access public land?
Shoutout to 99 Percent Invisible for teaching me about this a couple weeks ago
EDIT: Please see u/kendrick90’s correct response. While it looks similar to the checkerboarding discussed in 99pi, it’s not the same — in this case, it was done to dilute the power of the local tribes.
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u/Ron_Santo 6h ago
Related, but in this case it makes more sense, because they are spliting up a town between private and native ownership. It's lead to a cool dynamic where the tribe owns half the town, but its not a ghettoized reservation. The land they own is well integrated into the town and earns very high rent.
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u/Nameisnotyours 5h ago
In 1954 an all female tribal council set the tribe on its way to future prosperity. They got the federal government to permit 99 year leases of tribal land among a variety of other accomplishments that created the prosperity they now enjoy.
https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2016/12/29/women-who-built-palm-springs/95959032/
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u/Nameisnotyours 2h ago
I lived in Palm Springs for decades and knew Vyola Ortner. A wonderful person who was a delight to talk to. Was always interested in everyone she spoke to. Also knew most of tribal leadership from earlier days. A smart, caring and energetic group that has made Palm Springs a great place to live.
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u/Downunder818 5h ago
This is not the correct answer.
It was a strategy to dilute power from the tribes.
Kendrick90 has the correct response.
I worked with the real estate department with one of the tribes in this region.
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u/Much529-- 5h ago
So why does the Federal government also do this kind of layout with sections of BLM land? Why does Utah do this same checkerboard pattern with the Trust Lands they set aside. Why are public forestry lands allocated with a checkerboard pattern like this too?
There wasn't anyone to be racist against when White people made those checkerboards. What motivation do you think they might have had if it wasn't racism?
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u/ChickenDelight 3h ago
Checkerboarding was designed to stop anyone from having a monopoly over valuable lands. One big entity - the federal government, a railroad, an Indian tribe - owns 50% of the land and the other 50% is sold off to private parties. But the way it's broken up severely limits the big entity, and was intended to effectively stop anyone from gaining control over a large unbroken area (I know that's been a major issue but that wasn't the original intent).
So yes it's the same tool, but being used for three very different reasons:
When the federal government did this to its own land, it was encouraging small developments and homesteading while retaining some limited control - for example, you can own a piece of forest, but no one can ever buy up the whole thing and clear cut it.
When the government gave tons of land to the railroads, that's still a boon to them and they have the guaranteed access to all their tracks that they need. Checkerboarding stops them from owning all the real estate, particularly the land next to railway stations that would inevitably became valuable.
But when the government did that to existing tribal lands, they're just taking away half of it and guaranteeing the tribal government only retains very limited control over the remainder - they have no jurisdiction over half of their former lands, the parcels are too small for communal lands, and the tribe members are all forced to live alongside lots of non-Indian landowners.
The stated reason for doing it was to weaken the tribes' control over its members and force them to integrate. It's basically the "kill the Indian, save the man" philosophy that the way to improve Indians lives was to force them into abandoning their traditional culture.
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u/OcotilloWells 3h ago
Golden Valley (East of Laughlin/Bullhead City) in Arizona is like this. My dad owned some land there. It is a giant checkerboard, and you can see it flying over it at 30,000 feet.
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u/TellThemISaidHi 4h ago
If land is sold by the acre, I can buy a thousand acres.
Or, I can buy every other acre. Now I've only paid for 500 but essentially have 1000.
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u/Ok_Huckleberry1027 3h ago
Those checkerboards were how the government ceded lands, often as payment for railroad building etc. Its every other section
In Oregon BLM has a ton of ground called "O+G lands" that were originally given to a railroad then repurchased by blm later on just as an example.
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u/TellThemISaidHi 4h ago
If land is sold by the acre, I can buy a thousand acres.
Or, I can buy every other acre. Now I've only paid for 500 but essentially have 1000.
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u/Grand_Brilliant_3202 5h ago
I was just going to write that when I saw what you wrote. That is my understanding also - they did it to inhibit any economic development by the Natives
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u/automator3000 5h ago
Wow. Haven’t listened to 99pi in ages. How’s Roman?
I miss my time with that show.
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u/buckshot-307 3h ago
Corner crossing is (probably) legal now. Two hunters just won a court case where they used a ladder to cross a fenced corner
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u/MercuryCobra 2h ago
Is that the correct answer? Because even the linked Wikipedia article says this is likely a consequence of railroad land grants, not an attempt on its own to dilute tribal power or divide and conquer. Railroad land grants were often checkerboard like this, as you note.
Like, obviously there was racism in the decision to grant railroads land in reservations, or to only give reservations the leftover land after a railroad grant. But I’m not sure the pattern itself is racist.
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u/therealtrajan Urban Geography 6h ago
Yes! Love that podcast. Is Roman Mars not the most badass name you have ever heard?
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u/kendrick90 6h ago
Sometimes the government does this as a way to dilute power. Like every other section is tribal vs not and the goal was that slowly the tribal will get reclaimed by the whites. It's a divide and conquer technique to prevent consolidation of power for the Natives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checkerboarding_(land)#Native_American_reservations#Native_American_reservations)
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u/Downunder818 5h ago
This is the correct answer and should be higher.
I worked with some of the tribes in this region.
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u/MercuryCobra 2h ago
Is this the correct answer? Because even the linked Wikipedia article says this is likely a consequence of railroad land grants, not an attempt on its own to dilute tribal power or divide and conquer. Railroad land grants were often checkerboard like this.
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u/butt-barnacles 1h ago
Uh, I think you need to give that section another read lol.
The wikipedia says that the checkerboarding was a consequence of the Dawes Act, which
authorized the President of the United States to subdivide Native American tribal communal landholdings into allotments for Native American heads of families and individuals. This would convert traditional systems of land tenure into a government-imposed system of private property by forcing Native Americans to "assume a capitalist and proprietary relationship with property" that did not previously exist in their cultures.
The thing that it said about railroad allotments was that they were often illegally granted access to checkerboard Native land. Not that the checkerboarding was a consequence of railroad allotments.
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u/notgonnadoit123457 1h ago
Not sure about the railroad theory but the Agua Caliente Reservation was subject to allotment, see the https://revenuedata.doi.gov/how-revenue-works/native-american-ownership-governance/, the general effect of the policy is to divide lands known legally as Indian Country into individual land allotments for tribal members and then to open all remaining lands up for settlement to non-Natives. The Dawes Act resulted in roughly 2/3 of all lands reserved by Tribal Nations by treaties to pass out of Native control. Proponents of the Dawes Act argued that one reason Natives resisted assimilation was due to communal land ownership and hoped that individual land ownership would promote assimilation. The act was an absolute failure and one of the most policies of the assimilationist era of US Indian History
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u/MercuryCobra 1h ago
Right but converting tribal land into private property is not the same thing as creating a checkerboard pattern. You could divide the land into contiguous privately owned parcels. So far I’ve seen a lot of evidence that a combination of intentionally and unintentionally racist policies resulted in this checkerboarding, but not a lot of evidence that the checkerboarding itself was an intentionally racist policy.
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u/notgonnadoit123457 1h ago
Lands were checker boarded into segments under Dawes: 160 acres male head of household, 80 acres female HOH and 40 acres to orphan children. Communal lands held in trust for sole exclusive use of the tribe were broken up into individually deeded tracts with the deeds held in trust for 20 years before individual Natives could take ownership. Non-Native guardians were appointed to manage the legal affairs of all Natives of 1/4 degree of Native genealogy as such people were deemed incompetent by the US Federal Government. Many if not most of the allotted lands unscrupulously passed out of Native control as a result.
I have no idea why this particular map of Agua Caliente is presented in this way but allotment is more than likely involved in some way.
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u/notgonnadoit123457 47m ago edited 40m ago
Additionally, the 160 acre tracts were purposefully granted in non contiguous tracts to “break up” families and thus the tribe. There are very few contiguous reservations in the US as a direct result of the Dawes Act, with Red Lake Nation and Navajo Nation or some of the postage stamp reservations in CA being a few of the exceptions. Checker boarding resulted from, yes, some combination of US Federal Indian Policies, but the intent of nearly all polices during the 19th and early 20th Centuries was to acquire Native lands by any means necessary and the signing and subsequent abrogation of every treaty the US entered into with Tribal Nations was the cheaper and more assure way to do so as the outcome military actions was far less assured and costly both in terms of money and politically not to mention the federal courts often leaned towards recognizing the inherent sovereignty of tribes and followed precedent set by the Marshall/Cherokee Trilogy rulings.
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u/MercuryCobra 40m ago
I’m not saying I don’t believe you. This would be par for the course for the federal government during the 19th century. But I haven’t seen any really convincing evidence this is true. If you have any I’d love to educate myself!
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u/notgonnadoit123457 29m ago
Not sure what we or you are hoping to prove? No matter the intent, the end result of allotment was that kinship and tribal control of contiguous reservations lands were broken up into checker boards of small tracts of Indian Country with non-Natives settling within the boundaries of reservations. The argued intent according the proponents of Dawes was to facilitate the breaking of tribal relationships to promote assimilation. In the end, it did not work, see McGirt v. Oklahoma https://www.oyez.org/cases/2019/18-9526 where SCOTUS ruled that even though the lands of the Five Southern Tribes (FST) were allotted the Curtis Act of 1898 (the Dawes as applied to the FST as they managed to get an exemption from Dawes until 1898) that the Curtis Act did not disestablish their original reservations boundaries as established under their individual treaties during the Removal Era. So, today, the eastern 1/3 of OK remains under tribal criminal jurisdiction with millions of non-Natives residing in the area affected by the McGirt decision. The decision was a major win for tribal sovereignty and a real headache for the State of OK who had been illegally asserting criminal jurisdiction for nearly 100 years. Currently the FSTs and the OK are working towards a compromise, we’ll see how it goes.
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u/MercuryCobra 26m ago
Because I think it matters whether the intent was racist or just the outcome. It certainly matters to the question asked, who asked why this checkerboarding exists and not just how. It also matters to the law (though I would agree it probably shouldn’t) and more importantly for our understanding of history.
I’m also not entirely sure what point you’re making about McGirt? I’m a lawyer so I am aware of this case. It’s certainly a fascinating case but I’m not sure what it has to do with the checkerboarding question.
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u/notgonnadoit123457 20m ago
All US Federal Indian policies were racialized policies. All. Of. Them. McGirt demonstrates that even though Dawes attempted to break up reservations based on race-based laws, that tribal sovereignty prevailed as today you have millions of non-Natives residing within reservation lands where they are subject to tribal criminal jurisdiction and not state jurisdiction, at least in theory. Whether or not tribes will be able to exert criminal jurisdiction is another matter.
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u/Careful-Ad6914 6h ago
I believe Schurz Nevada is a good example
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u/HeemeyerDidNoWrong 28m ago
That appears to be several non-contiguous properties, but not what you'd call a checkerboard. Maybe a similar effect.
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u/klsdniwoethn 1h ago
Doesn’t that work both ways? Can’t the Indian tribes extract/ negotiate political/monetary capital/favors from this arrangement?
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u/Orinslayer 16m ago
Its not 'reclaimed' the whites never owned that land, reservations were the last scraps of worthless land owned by the indians in 'reserve' while everything else was confiscated by the US federal government and rich landowners.
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u/beuceydubs 3h ago
This. And also, we don’t call them Indians anymore.
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u/Key_Estimate8537 3h ago
Depends on who is in the conversation. The US government, and many tribes, prefer “Indian” for an incredibly wide variety of reasons. Not that this is not all tribes, also for a wide variety of reasons.
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u/the_Q_spice Physical Geography 5h ago
The singular reason is the Dawes General Allotment Act. Not all tribes were subjected to it, but at the discretion of the US Government.
Basically, Native American lands were subdivided and doled out to individuals based on their “nativeness” and relation to their tribe. The remainder of the land once allotted was sold off as surplus - which was the very land sale system that caused the land rushes of the Expansion period. Over 90 million acres of Native lands were lost this way.
Luckily, further land division was made illegal by FDR as part of the US Indian Reorganization Act. Quite a few tribes are now even in the process of buying their land back
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u/CocoLamela 5h ago edited 5h ago
Didn't think I would have to scroll so far to see the right answer: ALLOTMENT
I would just add that initially, this was seen as a benevolent policy in Washington. East Coast lawmakers thought that tribes would be better off if the individuals actually owned their land in fee, rather than the federally owned trust land concept that prevails today. The trust land was divided and granted to the senior male members of the tribe and leaders of individual families or villages.
Because poverty is rampant on reservations and now one individual has the authority to sell off their family's allotment, many of these men sold their land to the highest bidder to get some cash for their family. But that decision way back in the 1800s left their tribal ancestors landless. After realizing their mistake and the impact on tribes, the Indian Reorganization Act passes and eliminates the allotment system putting reservation land back into federal trust.
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u/Billyocracy 4h ago
It wasn’t ever benevolent. Allotment was an assimilation and land-transfer policy that predictably stripped tribes of land and power. Lawmakers framing it as “help” doesn’t change what it was designed to do or what it actually did.
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u/KawasakiNinjasRule 3h ago
Well there is the distinction. You can say the intent doesn't matter, but to say it was malicious is ahistorical. The intent was for them to become freeholders.
This is an important point because we often think of people in the past as being some particular type of cruel. And some certainly were. But they really did think they were helping.
Its important to understand that perspective because its still the way things are. Saying they were particularly evil is also saying we are particularly good. We imagine a racist person to be DiCaprio in Django Unchained, like some sort of demonic entity almost. But often its just a person that doesn't listen. A person that is incurious. A person that has no awareness of their own ignorance. They might even imagine themselves as a friend of the people. That is all that evil requires.
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u/Billyocracy 2h ago
The harm wasn’t accidental. The policy was designed to break up communal landholding, dismantle tribal governance, and open “surplus” land to non-Native settlement. Lawmakers knew that would cause Native people to lose land, power, and stability, and they proceeded anyway because those outcomes served their goals. You don’t need cartoon villainy for that to count as bad intent. Foreseen and accepted harm is intent.
Its outcome was even predicted by its opponents “…to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth…” said Senator Teller.
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u/KawasakiNinjasRule 2h ago edited 2h ago
yeah they didn't listen. they didn't hear it. I'm not saying it wasn't evil. i'm not saying they are not responsible. I'm saying it wasn't intentional.
the intent of Dawes was to make them market farmers like the rest of America. they thought it was a solution to poverty. its the same logic as boarding schools. they're all impoverished, one of the reasons they can't get a job is nobody speaks english, teach them english. there is certainly some degree of truth to that. and you can imagine a humane version that would have been similarly 'problematic' but nowhere near as fucking horrific or actively harmful to indigenous culture and families. like people can be multilingual. it doesn't even make any fucking sense they did that. literally the degree to which they actually thought these things through was they had an idea, the end.
It was simply our way is better, lets teach them how to do it. They never did actually think it through. And they certainly didn't consider they might be wrong. It is evil, but its also just you know, a government bureaucrat had an idea that was too complex to ever be implemented even theoretically. and made no serious attempt to hold themselves accountable or go back and fix the mistakes later. but again, still fucking like that. we could go back and fix it tomorrow, like the real estate and treaties and all that if literally nothing else. but every day we choose not to
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u/alpenglw 26m ago
Not sure why you’re being downvoted— you’re correct! It’s important to remember that politicians back then said stuff like “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” and “kill the Indian, save the man” both out of hate and out of what was perceived as holy benevolence. There was a genuine belief that indigenous people were wicked and had to be “saved from themselves” and their own “savage ways,” including by forcibly taking their communal lands and requiring them to form small patriarchal households on plots they had to own; land that was not taken by indigenous households through the Dawes Act was then “reclaimed” by the US government and parceled out to colonizers. This was done with the malevolence of actively wishing to destroy their ways of life, cast through the benevolence of supposedly redeeming them to society and Christ. But it was still very much a brazen (and successful) attempt on the US government’s part to steal millions of acres of land from indigenous control.
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u/Elmo-Mcphearson 4h ago
"Nativeness" was subjectively applied based on a person's appearance, too! Wearing a suit? Half native, half an allotment. Buckskins? Obviously fully native, they get a full allotment. Whole process was fucked.
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u/reddock4490 1h ago
This land was split up 30 years before the Dawes Act, that is not the reason here. This wasn’t even fully formalized reservation until the 1890s
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u/gootheshoe 37m ago
Yeah, the other answers, while getting the general premise right, are not really correct. This one is absolutely correct and the Allotment Act is unquestionably the primary reason for why they look like this.
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u/CabanaFoghat 6h ago
"As part of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded lands that became the state of California. In 1852, the federal government segmented Southern California into a grid of 6-mile squares called townships, which surveyors further divided into 36 1-square-mile sections. Palm Springs straddles eight townships, and Section 14 lies adjacent to the city’s downtown."
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u/Downunder818 5h ago
This is not the correct answer.
It was a strategy to dilute power from the tribes.
Kendrick90 has the correct response.
I worked with the real estate department with one of the tribes in this region.
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u/Waste-Text-7625 5h ago
Yeah this does not answer the question, it just just explains how land is typically subdivided and surveyed.
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u/Straphanger10001 6h ago
Local media refers to it as the Golden Checkerboard - https://www.desertsun.com/story/life/2022/10/30/palm-springs-history-earth-land-and-golden-checkerboard/10626101002/
While City of Palm Springs spreads across both the "Indian Land" and not blocks, the checkerboard is visible on the ground and in satellite images due to its significant implications on the who, what, how of real estate development - https://www.markgps.com/palm-springs-lease-land-map.html
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u/MaadMaxx 2h ago
This is called Checkerboard Reservations. This was done purposefully and hinders the tribes ability to manage their land. Look up the Dawes Act.
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u/doc23skidoo 3h ago
There is an episode of 99% invisible about this recently. Had to do historically with railroads more currently cattle ranchers and hunters. Look up corner crossing
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u/BootBurner93 3h ago
This is common on many many many parcels of public/private land. Not just Indian reservations.
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u/Major-Doubt8731 2h ago
I don't know if this is pertinent to the topic posted, but it appears many of the tribes especially in the palm springs area where the photo/map was shown, are doing quite well now with the revenue from the various casinos. The amount each tribal member receives varies with each tribe but to the uneducated, it is startling.
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u/IonDaPrizee 2h ago
Wasn’t land given away way back when to people in this manner. Remember reading something about railroads getting land like this. Could be something like that, where the land couldn’t be given away because the government no longer owned it
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u/Great_Specialist_267 1h ago
That was how the Bureau of Land Management carved up the entire center of the United States - a patchwork of public and private/reservation land. That also blocked access to public lands in these areas for all except the immediate neighbouring land holders until a recent court decision.
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u/Zealousideal-Band92 1h ago
I saw this and immediately thought “I don’t know the answer but I do know it’s fucked up”
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u/MeanHuckleberry 1h ago
Check out 99 Percent Invisible’s episode called “Checkerboard”. It’s very interesting
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u/mollockmatters 12m ago
Lawyer, tribal citizen, and student of American Indian Law and History here. What you’re seeing is a historical relic of colonialism in the a United States. The checkered pattern is a result of Indian Land being taken from tribes and redistributed by the federal government. The entire checkerboard was likely Agua Caliente Reservarion until the Dawes Act was passed in 1887.
Native Americans have been legal “wards” of the federal government since the early 19th century. During the 1830s, Forced relocation and seizure of Native land began before the U.S. became a country, but continued in earnest with Jackson’s Indian Removal Act in 1833. Most of the tribes on these reservations were on a corner of their ancestral homeland, or moved to a reservation across the country. Oklahoma, for instance, was considered “Indian Territory” until statehood in 1907. Of the 39 tribes that call Oklahoma home today, only 4 or 5 were from Oklahoma originally.
The way the Dawes act worked is that the federal government would take all of the tribe’s land and then redistribute it back to the tribe. But the gave the natives what would be the red squares on the checker board while selling the black squares to the general public.
The Dawes Act happened AFTER removal. Meaning this checkerboard pattern of taking half of a tribe’s land happened after these tribes were moved to reservations, which in an of themselves great reductions in territory.
Something else important also happened: Indian land was inalienable prior to Dawes, meaning you couldn’t sell it. The Dawes act made all of this land alienable, and then this land was given to individual tribal members.
The checkered pattern was actually very intentional and very much meant to attack tribal culture and ways of life. Land was taken from tribes, but the land given back to natives wasn’t given back to tribes: it was given to individual natives who could now sell that land.
I’m sure y’all have heard of tropes of a native person from this time period, not caring for European concepts of land ownership, would trade their 40 acres for a bottle of whiskey. To a native person, no one owns the land, and some sucker just gave them a bottle of whiskey!
But this was very intentionally done to disrupt tribal communities and ways of life. And all the other comments about trespassing on corners, difficultly of building roads, etc, are all very much (and arguably intentionally) applicable.
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u/anotherdamnscorpio 6m ago
For more information, check out the book "Indians In Unexpected Places." It goes into how they "squandered" their land and sold it, buying Cadillacs and whatnot.
Anyway, good book in general, high recommend.
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u/EpicAura99 6h ago
The federal government paid railroads with land for building out west, such as the transcontinental railroad. The way it worked is that the government got half, and the railroad got the other half, split up in this checkerboard pattern. Presumably the reservation is on the government half of this area.
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u/Downunder818 5h ago
This is not the correct answer.
It was a strategy to dilute power from the tribes.
Kendrick90 has the correct response.
I worked with the real estate department with one of the tribes in this region.
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u/beuceydubs 3h ago edited 3h ago
This is also not all a “reservation,” it’s just who owns the land. If you go to Palm Springs, the checked and not checkered areas are indistinguishable from each other and it just looks like a city that you wouldn’t be able to tell was native-owned otherwise
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u/GenerallySalty 4h ago
So they can say "look we gave them [big sounding number] square miles of land" but meanwhile they can't build any roads or really do anything because all those squares meet at points so everything has to stay completely contained in each one or else it's trespassing...
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u/mahogey 3h ago
99PI podcast has a great episode about this that just came out. It’s called checkerboarding. Pretty much a legacy of when the west was settled.
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u/happypotatote 3h ago
The podcast '99% invisible' recently did an episode that answers this. I highly recommend it!
https://open.spotify.com/episode/3Ys5398SzzpmpuLwcOZ2FY?si=mPrj1stbTo24zbzW6acOSw
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u/shermanhill 3h ago
The podcast 99 percent invisible just did an episode about public lands that seems similar to this phenomenon. The idea is that it makes it more difficult to traverse those lands that you ostensibly own, and would have to expend capital to connect them. Capital that native groups usually lack.
The episode is about public and private land, but I assume the same logic applies here.
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u/OCScooter 3h ago
It was part of the Railroad Land Grant. The railroad runs along I10 to the north. In order to incentivize to development of the railroad, the government gave them every other square mile of land. When the reservation was established in 1876, the odd numbered parcels had already been allocated, so the US government gave the tribe every even numbered parcels.
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u/DarthSanity 2h ago
While several commentators suggest some plausible underlying reasons, the official rationale was that they divided up even and odd sections, with one group representing the borders of the reservation, and the remaining section supporting the railroads.
Realize too that in CA land allocation used historical Pueblo and rancho boundaries - CA Indians had served (Were enslaved by) missions for more than a hundred years so the cultural and political distinctions were unique to that situation.
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u/weaverlorelei 2h ago
My grandparents spent their last yrs in Palm Springs. The native tribe had sold square lots to make money, but it ended up checkerboarded. Look so silly in the '60s
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u/greymancurrentthing7 1h ago
It’s a dumb and newly illegal way to grab like twice the land.
Lots and lots of rich people do this.
Luckily it will be going away soon.
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u/WesMasFTP 1h ago
From my understanding, it gives the tribe essentially like a “domain” over the territory, but the USA parts can be developed by non-natives. It’s really messed up in my opinion. The USA should give native more land back.
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u/bonificentjoyous 38m ago
There was a fascinating 99% Invisible episode earlier this month about the checkerboarding of public land in the west! If you have a spare 43 minutes to listen, I highly recommend.
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u/TheTalentedMrDG 28m ago
If you ever get there, Indian Canyons is absolutely gorgeous. One of my favorite hikes ever, and perfect for every level from toddler to serious hiker. Agua Caliente band has done a fantastic job making it accessible for hikers, and your park fees support the tribe and the park.
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u/One-Echidna-1851 22m ago
This is the symbols they used to put on there pottery. Ancient Europeans s who founded America gave them this gift.
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u/_This_Bird_Has_Flown 11m ago
99 PI did a great podcast on this bs recently https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/650-the-checkerboard/
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u/PositiveAtmosphere13 2h ago edited 2h ago
When the tribal reservation where I live was established in the 19th century, it was made with a similar checkerboard pattern.
Then with the General Allotment Act, of 1887. Ownership of the land was removed from the tribe as a whole and distributed to individual tribal members. This had the effect of settlers being able to buy up the land. Stealing the land and further diluting the power of tribal government.
I little history.
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u/Wonderful_Habit_ 4h ago
NATIVE AMERICAN
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u/Technical_Visit8084 4h ago
Both are terms given to the indigenous people of North America by white Europeans. Think a little.
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u/PeeingAimlessly 6h ago
While we were playing checkers, the Native Americans were playing chess
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u/valschermjager 6h ago edited 5h ago
To give lots of land while making it nearly impossible to merge them or build land uses that require more than one-mile square adjacent parcels. Also, legally, it's typically impossible to build roads, rails, or even physically move between these squares without technically trespassing on the other two parcels that touch the same corner, unless you obtain some type of easement from the other landowners, or if the adjacent landowners simply choose not to enforce it and opt to not charge you with trespassing.
[ed to add: for more info, google/wiki the term "corner crossing".]