How Land Reshuffling Made the American West’s Racial Divide
Today the city of Palm Springs is the Las Vegas of California. It is a playground for the rich and famous nestled right at the heart of the Coachella Valley. All the Valley’s casinos, Hollywood-style entertainment, and day spas offer a glitzy distraction from the area’s troubled history. Before Palm Springs became smothered in blond hair and bright lights, it was the home of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]That transformation, and the Tribe’s ongoing effort to recapture its heritage, is one of many examples of settler colonialism around the globe. Time and again—from the United States to Canada, Australia, South Africa, Israel, and elsewhere—land has been a crucial tool in constructing and deepening racial hierarchies that subordinate indigenous groups to colonial populations who deem themselves racially superior.
Land is a powerful tool in the construction of racial hierarchy. Select racial groups dominate others by appropriating their land and then creating political rules and economic mechanisms to entrench that dominance. As power in these societies becomes tightly linked with the racialized ownership of land and the privileges that ownership confers, a race-based social order is woven into the social fabric. How people are born, how they are raised and live, the education they receive, their work opportunities, and even when and how they die are all shaped by the color of their skin. Because land is power, and because settler populations took the land, those racial hierarchies remain for generations and leave indelible marks on society.
The story of Palm Springs is the story of how land reallocation put white settlers and entrepreneurs at the top. “As intelligent and as strong as we are…because our skin was darker, because we did not speak the same language, and we were not Christian, they [whites] felt that they could do what they want,” Dr. Sean Milanovich, a Tribal member whose father served as Tribal Chairman for over 30 years, told me. “And so they stole our land.”
The Gold Rush and westward expansion brought American settlers to Cahuilla territory beginning in the 1850s with the American acquisition of western states from Mexico. It was part and parcel of what I call the Great Reshuffle: the massive upheaval in land ownership in societies across the globe over the last two centuries. The Cahuilla along with the nearby Cupeño, Luiseño, and Serrano peoples were forced to sign the Treaty of Temecula on Jan. 5, 1852, ceding their land base in exchange for a far smaller permanent reservation.
That was just the start. Two decades later, the U.S. government gave the Southern Pacific Railway a right-of-way to build its railroad straight through the Coachella Valley and Cahuilla territory, piggybacking off early stagecoach routes.
In keeping with a common practice at the time known as “checkerboarding,” the government allocated the railroad a checkerboard of one-square-mile sections of land for several miles extending out from both sides of the railway line in order to help fund their track-laying operations. That carved up Cahuilla land. By executive order in 1876-1877, the government allocated the odd-numbered sections of the checkerboard to the railway and created a reservation comprising the even-numbered sections called the Agua Caliente Indian Reservation.
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The Agua Caliente reservation, like other Native American and Cahuilla reservations, was ostensibly an autonomous space where the Tribe would have sovereignty over its own affairs and could conduct self-governance. But that promise was a false one from the start. The U.S. government prohibited tribal self-governance on the reservation and installed the paternalistic Bureau of Indian Affairs to conduct reservation governance and manage tribal affairs for decades. Government agents adopted practices of assimilation that sought to subjugate the Agua Caliente.
By the 1920s, as tourism to the hot springs of the region picked up and the Agua Caliente and other Cahuilla bands struggled, many Cahuilla took service jobs in the growing white-owned tourist industry as toll collectors, campground operators, and hotel workers while others worked as store owners, fire guards, and policemen. One official observed that “It is becoming more and more apparent that these Indians will secure their livelihood through working for the White settlers.”
In keeping with this spirit, the U.S. government sought to break up Tribal landholdings by subdividing them into individually owned plots through a process known as land allotment. Land allotment sought to break down tribal cohesion and assimilate Indians into American cultural norms and capitalist economic practices. White politicians viewed the transition as a moral, economic, and cultural imperative critical to building an American national identity. Tribal leadership and dozens of members of the Agua Caliente pushed back, but their resistance was overridden. The Tribal membership became divided over claiming allotments.
By the 1950s, the railroad’s checkerboard sections of the Palm Springs area became wealthy and white while the Agua Caliente’s checkerboard sections on the reservation became the home of comparatively poorer Tribal communities. The reservation sections also attracted other disadvantaged minorities because they were more affordable. African Americans and Latinos moved to the Palm Springs area in large numbers from the 1920s through the 1950s to work in the growing tourist economy. They settled as renters on reservation land. Many of them moved into the heart of downtown Palm Springs in one of the Agua Caliente’s checkerboard squares known as Section 14.
That land became much more valuable starting in 1959 when individual allotments were finalized and the Agua Caliente successfully negotiated with the federal government to lease their lands for up to 99 years. The wealthier white community, backed by the City of Palm Springs, embarked on a campaign to expel the poorer inhabitants of Section 14 to clear it for business.
Native American displacement and settler land grabs over the course of early U.S. history manufactured a new and rigid racial order not only for the Agua Caliente but for hundreds of other Native American tribes across the U.S. as well. White settlers made economic, social, and political gains while indigenous groups lost on all of these fronts. Behind it all were decisions about who got land, followed by decisions about how they could live on it, keep it, and preserve their lives on it— or not.
The disparities remain evident today. According to US Census Bureau data from 2018, 25% of Native Americans lived in poverty compared to 10% for whites. There are also enormous racial gaps in education and health. Only 24% of Native American adults have a college degree compared to 47% of white adults and there is a similar gap in college enrollments. Native Americans die at higher rates of diabetes, heart disease, and alcohol- and drug-related causes.
The Agua Caliente started to close the racial wealth gap in the Palm Springs area starting around the 1970s. The Tribal Council began cooperating on economic development and struck an important land-use deal with the city of Palm Springs that specified Tribal administration of its lands in the city, including Section 14.
The Agua Caliente opened a set of casinos that have created revenue streams used to fund broader Tribal economic development, environmental stewardship, cultural regeneration, and educational initiatives. The Agua Caliente are now using their economic gains to fuel renewed efforts to revitalize weakened elements of the Tribe’s culture, language, and spiritual traditions.
Hanging on to some portion of their land and its advantages gives the Agua Caliente a foothold to rebuild and fight back. Still, recapturing heritage is not an easy task. Racial hierarchy—forged and hardened by decades of settler reforms—does not die easily.
This article has been excerpted from Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies by Michael Albertus. Copyright © 2025. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.