Families were torn apart as a generation of California Indians was separated from its traditional land, language and culture. Indian children and adults were apprenticed to whites, while "vagrant" Indians were auctioned off to the highest bidder.

It was all legal under early California laws.

More than 150 years later, California still is trying to compensate for the historic injustices, without overly disrupting society at large. Treaty decisions then echo today in the constant clanging of slot machines at Indian casinos scattered haphazardly across the state.

The debate degenerated into public name-calling last week, when California Nations Indian Gaming Association chairwoman Brenda Soulliere objected to what she called an "anti-Indian" symposium organized by "hate groups" to help local government officials respond to casino proposals.

California Gambling Control Commission Chair John Hensley responded that Soulliere's characterizations "disrespected and demeaned the dignity of your own members" and that "CNIGA has a ways to go to reach political maturity."

California voters set up the emotion-laden debate in March 2000 by approving a gambling initiative marketed as a way to help Indians impoverished by early settlers.

Now, communities have little power to stop construction, even in urban areas, where some never envisioned them. It is just one of the contemporary clashes with its roots in early California history.

Tribes are becoming increasingly litigious in protecting their property and fishing rights, some granted under early laws.

Indians along the Klamath and Trinity rivers, for instance, are suing to minimize water diversions to farmers in the Upper Klamath Basin and Sacramento Valley.

-- The Fair Political Practices Commission is suing two tribes, which are among the state's biggest campaign contributors, for not complying with state campaign laws, setting up a fight over tribes' sovereignty.

-- Gov. Gray Davis tried to find a balance this fall between protecting sacred Indian lands without going too far. He vetoed a bill developers and business groups said was so broad it would grant tribes veto power over both private and public land statewide, but signed a narrower bill adding protections for certain historic, cultural, or sacred sites.

It was against that backdrop that Senate leader John Burton, D-San Francisco, author of the sacred lands bill, asked the state Research Bureau to look at earlier state laws that in various forms both enslaved and protected the state's first residents.

The episodes are "a reminder of the economic motivations that have historically led to tribal and cultural eradication," Burton said.

The state's 1849 Constitution denied Indians the right to vote, a right fully won only with federal legislation in 1924.

Even before California was granted statehood, the Legislature passed an Act for the Government and Protection of Indians in 1850, after the Senate reduced Indians' punishment for stealing from 100 to 25 whip lashes.

The act let whites petition local justices of the peace to remove Indians from their land, and to indenture Indian children until they reached adulthood -- 15 years for girls, 18 for boys. An 1860 amendment raised the ages to 25 and 30 years, respectively; Indians over age 21 could be indentured for 10 years.

There were plenty of orphaned Indian children, a result of the nearly $1.3 million the state spent on "expeditions against the Indians" between 1851 and 1859. But newspaper accounts of the time also accuse whites of stealing Indian children for sale, sometimes murdering their parents.

The act also permitted whites to pay an Indian's criminal fine; the Indian then was required to work until the fine was paid off. Indians had no appeal from a justice's decision.

Any white citizen could bring a complaint against any able-bodied Indian "who shall be found loitering and strolling about, or frequenting public places where liquors are sold, begging, or leading an immoral or profligate course of life." Such "vagrant" Indians were then auctioned off to the highest bidder for up to four months' work, unless they could post a bond that required them to get a job.

Portions of the law stood until 1937, though whipping was outlawed in 1865. Child indenturing was repealed in 1863, but the practice continued.

Some of the apprenticeship proposals were offered as humane alternatives to the wholesale slaughter of Indians in parts of the state. Indians were stealing cattle and horses; settlers along California's northern coast often responded by killing Indians on sight, according to an 1860 legislative report on the Mendocino Indian War.

The location of casinos and proposed casinos across California today also is a descendent of politicians' decisions long ago.

The federal government negotiated 18 treaties with California tribes, but the U.S. Senate rejected them in a secret session in 1852 at the urging of state officials.

Those treaties would have set aside 11,700 square miles, or 7.5 percent of the state, as reservations. State legislators objected that would prompt more violence from white miners sifting the Indian land for gold.

Instead, California eventually set aside parcels of land for so-called "mission Indians." In the last century, the federal government purchased plots of land, called "rancherias," for homeless Indians.

The fallout from those decisions continues today, as casinos have sprung up on the scattering of Indian land and on ancestral land tribes say should still be theirs.