In the Grand Scheme of Things: California Indians and California Land Claims, 1920–1945 Available to Purchase

This article illuminates how a constellation of swindlers engaged in Native American land claims litigation scams in California for personal gain. Rev. Frederick G. Collett and a pyramid-scheme group called the Homesteaders, Inc., were able to take advantage of major policy shifts regarding California Indian land claims and restitution to embezzle from and swindle Indigenous people who entrusted them to represent their interests. In the process, this article suggests, their financial opportunism opened the door to surprising and uncomfortable alliances. By exploring these dimensions of organizing around the land claims cases and the opportunism that emerged alongside Native efforts for land restitution, this article demonstrates how the politics of Indian Country during a crucial part of the twentieth century was forced to split its focus due to endemic predatory practices. Using newspapers and archival sources from inter-tribal organizations like the California Indian Brotherhood and California Indian Rights Association, this essay incorporates the perspectives from Native Americans fighting against those they saw as interlopers between 1920 and 1945. In the end, Native American organizers spent decades fighting within a convoluted federal legal process for restitution for lost land while also fighting tooth and nail against the endemic financial opportunism the needlessly complex restitution process engendered.