The second awakening began about 1903, when the Northern California Indian Association, or as it is often called, the California Indian Association, began its campaign for the relief of the homeless Indians of California, then supposed to number about 8,000 souls. Every avenue of assistance proposed seemed to lead back to the land question. Without some security of tenure it seemed impossible to accomplish any lasting improvement in Indian conditions, and inasmuch as the landless condition of the Indians was due to the acts and omissions of the National Government, the Indian Association appealed to the Congress of the United States for relief, in so far as land was necessary. The Association did not ask for reservations, believing that more Indian reservations in California would be detrimental to all concerned. They did not ask that the Indians be given farms, or that they should be made rich; merely that they be given small allotments of land, where they would be secure. The California Indians have always been self-sustaining. That is, they have received no aid from the Government or from anyone else. They have often been below the starvation line and usually not far above it, but such as their living was, it was their own. Most of the California Indians have in some measure adjusted themselves to the industrial life about them and perform whatever labor they can get. The Indian Association planned not to interfere in any manner with their independence, or with their industrial position. Above all things they did not wish the Indians pauperized. Also, the Indian Association did not wish the Indians concentrated. Where too many Indians are concentrated in one place, there is not sufficient work and the Indians themselves have their own reasons for remaining within their ancestral districts, which we may call superstitious or sentimental. The old racial antagonism between the antagonistic racial stocks also renders it inadvisable to concentrate. The Indian Association therefore proposed that in places where no land for allotment could be secured from the public domain, small tracts should be purchased, in the immediate neighborhood of the Indians, where they have friends and employers.[68]