GRAPHIC: N. DESAI/
SCIENCE,
BASED ON FARRELL
ET AL
. (^1
SCIENCE science.orgtribal publications; government corre-
spondence with tribes; judicial records
during the Indian Claims Commission
years (1946–1978); Interior Department
records since 1824, including maps; and
374 ratified United States–Indian treaties.
The Farrell et al. dataset locates
tribes in finite spaces during the 19th
century, allowing better understanding
of tribal movements and investigation
of the reasons for their involuntary or
voluntary movements before the gov-
ernment’s forced migrations under the
Indian Removal Act signed into law by
President Andrew Jackson in 1830 ( 2 ).
The massive dataset covers a long range
of time, from the early 1820s, and in-
cludes a second major episode of tribal
land loss due to the Dawes Act of 1887.
This legislation undermined traditional
communal land tenure practices by al-
lotting individual plots of what had been
tribal land as private property to each
enrolled member of a tribe. An estimated
173 tribes, bands, and communities were
involved in land allotments ( 3 ). This left
large surpluses of land and contributed to
drastic reductions in the land area owned
by Native Americans. From a pre-Colum-
bus estimate of 5 million Native people in
North America, the population dropped be-
low 238,000 by the end of the 1800s, when
Indians were called the “vanishing race” ( 4 ).
With this new dataset, it is possible to
learn through stages or phases how this
happened rather than guesswork with car-
tography. Imagine a hypothetical map of
the “United Indian Nations of America”,
and this research informs us of the loca-
tion of tribes after their forced migrations,
and in some instances of multiple migra-
tions such as the Delaware Nation of the
New England area, who were removed nine
times and now reside within the Cherokee
Nation in Oklahoma. One of the prob-
lems that the research had to solve was
dealing with the fluctuating boundaries
of Indigenous communities. In addition,
tribal domains sometimes consisted of two
or more groups in alliances occupying the
same hunting or fishing area, such as the
Sauk and Fox, Cheyenne and Arapaho.
The “termination policy” that ended
trust status protections in 109 cases of
Indigenous lands, and the relocation pro-
gram from 1952 and 1953 to 1975, led to
the demand from energy companies seek-
ing coal, oil, gas, and uranium. Without the
government’s trust protection, companies
dispossessed Native individuals and tribes
of their lands and resources. Increased de-
mand for tribal natural resources in the
1960s and 1970s forced those tribes with
natural resources to form a protective or-ganization called the Council of Energy
Resource Tribes (CERT) in 1975 with 25
original member tribes ( 5 ). Natural re-
sources of timber, oil, gas, coal, and ura-
nium exist in substantial quantities on
only about 60 reservations today. The
majority of tribal lands today have a very
small portion of land with oil-producing
and gas-producing wells.
By comparing postremoval reservations
in the 19th century with current reserva-
tions, with consideration to climate change
exposure and natural resources on tribal
lands, the research tells us that tribal eco-
nomic development, especially in the area
of agriculture, is hindered by extreme
heat and decreasing annual precipitation.
Eighty of 220 tribes saw an increase in
drought severity, and 105 saw an increase
in wildfire risk. There are 310 forested
reservations in 24 states, for example, but
about 70% of all US wildfires estimated in
2020 included burning on tribal lands ( 6 ).
Objectivity is one of the challenges fac-
ing this research because most of the data
sources have been produced by non-Indig-
enous parties. Without sufficient Native
perspectives, there is a continual general
bias in studying United States–tribal rela-
tions. As the first and most accurate macro-
scopic quantitative dataset at the present,
the work by Farrell et al. is an important
development. Possible next steps could in-
clude refining the dataset to include more
Native input data, such as descriptions of
resources on reservations from the Indian-
Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma
(1861–1936) ( 7 ) and the Doris Duke IndianOral History Collections developed in
the 1960s and 1970s ( 8 ).
With human population increases,
decreasing natural resources, and cli-
mate change, these data need to be
shared widely, and research partner-
ships formed, with organizations such
as the National Congress of American
Indians ( 9 ). The Inter Tribal Council
of Arizona of 21 tribes, Inter-Tribal
Council of the Five Civilized Tribes in
Oklahoma, and other Native organiza-
tions could use these data and partner
with researchers in planning toward
sustaining natural resources. Such co-
operation may include working at the
international level with the Indigenous
Environmental Network, founded in
1990, to bring awareness of environ-
mental injustice on tribal lands.
The basin area of Nevada and Utah or
the Four Corners area of the Southwest,
where natural resources have been heav-
ily extracted, could benefit from regional
focus and updated estimates to help in-
form developing tribal economies under
climate change conditions. About 243 of
nearly 600 tribes are involved in the gaming
industry, but it is a myth that all of them are
making huge profits ( 10 ). Such research and
partnerships could help them to develop and
diversify their economies and sustain their
remaining resources so that they would be
less dependent on gaming. The need for
such a dataset is justified and would be most
beneficial to various agencies of the federal
government, Native organizations, and espe-
cially the tribal nations ( 11 ). jREFERENCES AND NOTES- J. Farrell et al., Science 374 , eabe4943 (2021).
- J. Ostler, in Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the
United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding
Kansas (Yale Univ. Press, 2019), pp. 247–375. - F. E. Hoxie, in A Final Promise: The Campaign to
Assimilate the Indians, 1880–1920 (Univ. Nebraska
Press, 1984), pp. 1–39. - B. W. Dippie, in The Vanishing American: White Attitudes
& U.S. Indian Policy (Univ. Press Kansas, 1982), pp. 3–45. - D. L. Fixico, in The Invasion of Indian Country in the
Twentieth Century: American Capitalism and Tribal
Natural Resources (Univ. Press Colorado, 1998), pp.
159–163. - Congressional Research Service, Wildfire statistics, 6
August 2021; https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/IF10244.
pdf. - Indian Pioneer Papers Collection; https://digital.librar-
ies.ou.edu/whc/pioneer/. - The Doris Duke Indian Oral History Collection at the
University of Oklahoma, Norman; https://digital.librar-
ies.ou.edu/whc/duke/. - The National Congress of American Indians; http://www.ncai.
org. - D. L. Fixico, in Indian Resilience and Rebuilding:
Indigenous Nations in the Modern American West (Univ.
Arizona Press, 2013), pp. 170–178. - K. Frantz, in Indian Reservations in the United States:
Territory, Sovereignty, and Socioeconomic Change (Univ.
Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 156–273.
10.1126/science.abl6288HistoricalPresent dayA sharp decline in tribal land coverage
Farrell et al. estimate the historical (top) and present-day
(bottom) aggregate land base for all tribes (d).29 OCTOBER 2021 • VOL 374 ISSUE 6567 537