Qualla: La Posta Band of Diegueño Mission Indians

La Posta Band of Diegueño Mission Indians: Introduction

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1851 and 1852, agents of the United States government traveled through California negotiating treaties with Indigenous peoples. Eighteen treaties were signed, promising approximately 7.5 million acres of land to California's tribes in exchange for the cessation of their claims to the rest of the state. The Senate never ratified them. Under an injunction of secrecy, the treaties were buried — not filed, not officially rejected, simply hidden — until 1905, when they were finally unsealed. By then, more than fifty years had passed. The people who signed them, or whose parents and grandparents had signed them, had long been living with the consequences of a promise that the government had chosen to forget.

La Posta Band of Diegueño Mission Indians: The Treaties That Disappeared

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The eighteen California treaties of 1851 to 1852 represent one of the more striking episodes in the long history of broken agreements between the United States government and Indigenous peoples. Unlike treaties that were ratified and then violated — a pattern common enough across...

La Posta Band of Diegueño Mission Indians: The La Posta Reservation

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The La Posta Reservation encompasses 3,556 acres in the mountains of eastern San Diego County, near the Mexican border. Approximately sixty people live on the reservation. The La Posta Band belongs to the Kumeyaay people — specifically the Tiipai, the southern division of the Kum...

La Posta Band of Diegueño Mission Indians: Governance and the IRA

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The La Posta Band organized under an Indian Reorganization Act constitution on March 5, 1973 — more than a century after the unratified treaties had promised something different. The IRA, passed in 1934, reversed the Dawes Act allotment policy that had broken up tribal land holdi...

La Posta Band of Diegueño Mission Indians: A New Enterprise

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2025, the La Posta Band opened a cannabis dispensary on the reservation — a decision that reflects the economic toolkit available to tribal governments exercising sovereign rights within their territory. Cannabis operations on tribal lands exist in a complex legal space, but f...