the latest talk of making the torres martinez checkerboard tribe whole again
seeing as 17 of its 43 boundary crosses became inundated 100 years ago
owing to a little mistake by the army corps of engineers
not to mention the normally disintegrated status of the reservation
can be found at
http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/ca44_bono/tmcomm.html
where you may even recognize some of the players
the dashed line in the attached art shows which 40 percent of the staggered
land area of the reservation is presently also under the salton sea
m
the term checkerboard reservation is actually much more commonly used of
many other reservations with original territories of fairly normal shapes
from which a broad scattering of the land has been sold off to non indians
their patterns are said to have become checkered also but only in a very
loose sense
so when applied to the torres martinez & agua caliente reservations
the term checkerboard may actually be used in both senses
referring not only to their special original deliberate checkerboard design
but also to the ordinary random pattern of subsequent reductions they too have