Indian Claims Commission

The Indian Claims Commission was a judicial panel for relations between the United States Federal Government and Native American tribes. It was established in 1946 by the United States Congress to hear claims of Indian tribes against the United States. The commission was conceived as way to thank Native America for its unprecedented service in World War II and as a way to relieve the anxiety and resentment caused by America’s history of colonization of Indigenous peoples. The Commission created a process for tribes to address their grievances against the United States, and offered monetary compensation for territory lost as a result of broken federal treaties. However, by accepting the government's monetary offer, the aggrieved tribe abdicated any right to raise their claim again in the future, and on occasion gave up their federal status as a tribe after accepting compensation.

Anthropologists, historians and legalists as well as government officials were the dominant researchers, advocates and legal counsel for the plaintiff tribes and the defendant federal government. Anthropological research conducted for the Commission led towards the foundation of the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE), when the research and historical reports compiled in evidence for Native American claims was first amassed in 1954 at the inaugural Ohio Valley Historic Indian Conference, the predecessor organization later renamed as the ASE. A collection of the studies was published in the series "American Indian Ethnohistory", by Garland Publishing, in 1974. The methodology and theory of ethnohistorical research in general traces back to the work done by anthropologists and other scholars on claims before the Commission. The Commission also encouraged many neglected Indian groups in Southeast, the Northeast and California to create tribal organizations in order to pursue land claims. In particular, the 1946 act allowed any "identifiable" group of native descendants to bring a cause of action without regard to their federal recognition status. Tribes such as the Poarch Band of Creek Indians of Alabama trace their modern federal status to the efforts of Chief Calvin McGhee and his 1950s work with the Indian Claims Commission. Indian land claims, in fact, were one of the key reasons the Bureau of Indian Affairs established its Federal Acknowledgment Process in 1978. The Commission was adjourned in 1978 by Public Law 94-465, which terminated the Commission and transferred its pending docket of 170 cases to the United States Court of Claims on September 30, 1978. By the time of the Commission's final report, it had awarded $818,172,606.64 in judgments and had completed 546 dockets.