Mission Indian Federation

In the last decades of the 19th century, federal Indian policy evolved from one of containment to one of assimilation. The passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 determined to divide Indian lands into individual allotments in an attempt to destroy the communal nature of tribal life and to make more lands available for white settlement. While much of land allotment in Southern California was not started until the 1920s, the allotment process, when coupled with the paternalistic policies of the government, served as the catalyst for the birth of the Mission Indian Federation, a Native American protest movement that operated in Southern California from 1919 until 1960.

Created in 1919 at the behest of Jonathan Tibbet, a wealthy white land developer in Riverside, California, the ...