We Are Still Here.

In 2019, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued an official apology to Native people for the state's history of wrongdoing and established a Truth and Healing Council that aims to reconcile the state with its tribes. In 1969, a diverse coalition of urban Indians, Native student activists, and Indians who came from outside the state occupied the former federal prison of Alcatraz Island, bringing national attention to Native treaty rights and pressuring the federal government to embrace a new era of Indian policy based on self-determination rather than termination. In a political, cultural, and even environmental sense, California was perhaps the most hostile state in the union for Indigenous peoples. It took them more than two decades to get their day in court, but in 1928 Congress passed an act enabling the "Indians of California" - a new legal term defined as all Indigenous peoples residing in the state in 1852 - to sue the federal government for lost treaty lands. [Extracted from the article]