18 California Treaties

18 California Treaties is part of Megan Wilson’s Broken Treaties series reflecting on the concept/history of Manifest Destiny its misdirection and its legacy of generational trauma, violence, addiction, and the resistance and resilience igniting movements of social/cultural/political change and redirection.

Between 1851 and 1852, the United States Army under the direction of President Fillmore forced California's Tribal communities to sign 18 treaties that relinquished Native rights to their traditional lands in exchange for reservations. The treaties Native Californians signed in 1851−52 provided eighteen reservations (about 11,700 square miles, one-seventh of California) as homelands for Indigenous Peoples.

Treaties were the strategy used by the federal government to remove Native Americans title to their lands. By requiring/ forcing Indians to cede their homeland, the United States pledged to pay for the land and to set aside permanent reservations for Tribal Nations. However, treaties with sovereign nations, such as Native American Tribal Nations required ratification by the Senate. Unratified treaties had no standing. The California Indigenous groups that signed the treaties in 1851 and 1852 were villages of various tribal communities. When the 18 treaties were introduced in the U.S. Senate’s executive session, senators were not clear on their status as Tribal Nations and with regard to Mexico, from which California was acquired by the United States. Additionally, because of the gold rush, white Californians strongly objected to the treaties. Due to pressure from California representatives, Congress failed to ratify the 18 California treaties, instead ordering them to remain secret. These ongoing acts of land theft and genocide by the United States and its settler colonizers left California tribes impoverished.

To this day the land remains unceded by California’s Native Tribes.

18 California Treaties is part of Wilson’s Broken Treaties series and work reflecting on the concept/history of Manifest Destiny its misdirection, and its legacy of genocide, inherited and perpetuated trauma, violence, addiction, and the resistance, resilience, and redirection to healing. As recognized in Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in 1983, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 1996, and others that have followed, we must acknowledge and witness the impacts of our history before we can move forward and ensure the same injustices are not repeated. In addition, the United States must honor the promises it has made through land and other reparations, otherwise the nation will never be made whole.

Through the Broken Treaties series Wilson is creating a mandala for each of the treaties the U.S. has made and broken with American Indian tribes, including treaties made and never ratified. To do this she is covering wood medallions with cowhide suede and burning the name of each treaty with a mandala around it into the cowhide. These works will then be presented on wall paintings of American quilt patterns. The 18 California Treaties series will be presented against a wall painting of a Star of Bethlehem quilt pattern designed by Rebecca Humburg.

This work is informed in part by Wilson’s family’s roots as settler colonizers beginning in 1643 on stolen land in what is now Massachusetts and continuing on stolen land in what is now Ohio, Illinois, Iowa, Utah, Idaho, the Dakotas, Montana, and California starting in the 1800’s. It is also informed by her experiences growing up in Montana and the challenges she faced as a neglected and abandoned child/teen from a privileged family, and whose closest relationships were with friends and boyfriends who were Sioux, Crow, Oneida, and Mexican.