The Virtual Reservation: Land Distribution, Natural Resource Access, and Equity on the Yurok Forest

The abuse of Native American populations and the injustices of federal Indian policy have been well documented. Using the concept of distributive justice to frame the analysis, this article addresses five major Indian land-policy initiatives promulgated to "help" post-conquest indigenous populations, sonic of the equity arguments used to rationalize them, and their effects on land ownership and terrestrial resources in the Yurok Indian Reservation of northern California. This article then examines the treatment of Yurok land tenure and natural resources over the last 150 years as an indicator of how equitable these policies turned out to be. Maps of land claims and ownership are a graphic representation of the impacts of Indian land-policy initiatives. The cumulative result is an ecological legacy of land fragmentation and loss of indigenous ecosystems that will continue to constrain access to economically and culturally significant resources now and in the future, creating an unprecedented terrain for tribal and ecological restoration. Lastly, this article argues that natural resources decision-making should consider the rights of the few as well as the good of the many and incorporate ecological sustainability as part of a multidimensional framework for assessing equity that includes tribal rights on ancestral lands and the goal of distributive justice.