The map portrays the results of cases before the 1978 Indian Claims Commission in which an Indian tribe proved its original tirbal occupancy of a tract within the continental United States. The number on each tract refers to the Indian Land Area Map Index in the commission's final report.
"For scores of years, American Indian tribes have been litigating claims against the United States Government, seeking damages for various categories of wrongs done them. Perhaps the most common type of claim has been that land owned by an Indian tribe under the doctrine of "Indian title" was taken from the tribe without adequate compensation being paid. One step in a tribe's proving such a claim is demonstrating that a particular tract was indeed owned by it by Indian title: that the tribe had exclusively occupied and used a tract for a long time. The "Indian Land Areas Judicially Established" map summarizes the results of all such successful claims and depicts the tracts to which Indian ownership was established through a judicial proceeding. Thus the map joins two themes: the first that of Indian history, showing where the various tribes were originally located, and the second that of Indian legal history, where the reality of Indian history has been filtered through an Anglo-Saxon adversary judicial process."
