Donahue

MEMORANDUM OF DECISION

In this suit by twenty-five individual plaintiffs against the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior, the amended complaint alleges in substance and effect that plaintiffs are members of an unorganized band of Karuk Indians without any governing body recognized by the Secretary of the Interior; that the Karuks had once occupied certain lands in what is now northeastern Humboldt and southwestern Siskiyou Counties, part of the Klamath River watershed, now administered by the Secretary of the Interior as the Klamath National Forest and the Six Rivers National Forest; that in 1851 officers of the United States negotiated a treaty with the Karuks but wilfully and maliciously refused to submit it to the United States Senate for ratification; that, nevertheless, the Karuks were induced to move off their lands by promises to locate them on a reservation; that predecessors of defendants then conveyed much of the land to private persons and appropriated the rest for their own use without reserving any of the lands for the use of the Karuks; that three specified portions of these lands, Amaikiara, Inam and Katimin are sacredly and uniquely essential to the practice…