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Show Appendix B Land Claim 149 provision was made for protection should the Indians make an assault. Much to the surprise of the emigrants the horses were brought in the next morning well fed and not one missing. No one had been molested and none of the company's possessions had been touched. Hamblin had invoked the protection of the guest law and if any Indian had violated its provisions by theft or violence he would have been punished by his tribesmen.4 There are also instances of the Nuwuvi demanding that the whites submit to Nuwuvi laws. This makes more sense than the whites trying and punishing Indian people by the white laws, when they were, after all, on Nuwuvi land. In Cedar City during 1870, a white accidentally shot a Nuwuvi. The local Nuwuvi demanded that the man be killed, for "if by criminal carelessness an Indian caused the death of another, the dead man's family could demand the death of the guilty man or one of his relatives. . . ." 5 The white was not killed, though. The gradual taking over of Nuwuvi lands by the whites was not obvious to the Nuwuvi at first, for they assumed that the whites were merely coming to live among them as foreigners. The whites professed that their intentions were to live peacefully among the Nuwuvi. The Nuwuvi did not all realize that the whites would try to control their lives to achieve that peace. Even today the American conscience is not entirely at ease about its treatment of the native inhabitants. As were some white settlers in the 1800's, the U. S. government is still aware of the land rights of the native inhabitants and of the morality of some sort of compensation. The Indian Claims Commission was formed in 1946 to handle Indian claims against the government. According to the provisions of the Claims Commission, if an Indian suit were successful, the Indians were to be paid by the government for their land at the price of the land at the time it was seized. This price was to include the value of the agricultural and mineral wealth. Of course, the Claims Commission cannot hope to pay the Indians fully for the often forceful taking of their homeland, the loss of its use for all these years, and the resultant impoverishment of their people. In 1951 the Nuwuvi filed a claims suit with the Indian Claims Commission. The Chemehuevi initially filed a separate suit, but it |
