; compliance with NEPA. Sec. 7. Assistance to governing bodies. Sec. 8. Spiritual and cultural sites. Sec. 9. Process for recognition of historical-traditional use boundaries of qualified land grant-mercedes. 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) From the 17th to the mid-19th centuries, the Governments of Spain and Mexico made grants of land to individuals, groups, and communities throughout the Southwest United States to promote settlement in frontier lands. (2) The key land ownership feature for a land grants-merced was common lands, meaning lands that were not individually owned but were considered commons for use by all local residents to provide the necessary resources to sustain the entire community. (3) On February 2, 1848, the United States and Mexico ended the Mexican-American war by signing the Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement (commonly known as the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo), in which Mexico formally relinquished to the United States claims to over 790,000 square miles of land now constituting all or part of Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, and Wyoming. (4) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo included provisions under article VIII for the protection of established property rights, including community land grants located in the new territories, and the United States and Mexico further affirmed these protections in the Protocol of Queretaro. (5) Although the Senate struck article X of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as negotiated, the United States clarified in the subsequent Protocol of Queretaro that these grants … preserve the legal value which they may possess and the grantees in the new territories retained their property rights. (6) As noted by the Government Accountability Office in the 2001 report GAO–01–951, The Protocol specified the United States' position that land grant titles would be protected under the treaty and that grantees could have their ownership of land acknowledged before American tribunals. . (7) In the second half of the