NDNs today - NDN land and resources

Wow... I just wrote out the most eloquent beautiful discussion of Indian land and resources... and I posted it to the wrong blog. So all my humor readers who like my other blog for it's silliness sure got a morningful of confusion. And I lost it when I realized my mistake and deleted it quick. So let's start over again.

Indian land and resources - Indians as a group may be "have nots" in many areas, even when compared to other minorities... but there are 2 main exceptions. Land and natural resources. As you are going to see later, a TON of NDN law deals with lands and resources and the jurisdiction over them i.e. who gets to sell it or use it.

According to the BIA figures released most lately, NDN tribes and individuals own about 55.7 million acres of land - an INCREASE of 3.8 million acres since 1980. This includes 45.7 million acres of tribal trust land and 10.1 million acres of tribal trust allotments still held by NDNs or their descendants.

A big reason the number is growing is because some of the tribes are getting financially stronger, particularly due to casino revenue, and are using some of that cash to buy back neighboring (often, ancestral) lands that were given away or treatied away long ago.

ONe group, for example, called the Native American Land Conservancy, is dedicated to buying and preserving land sacred to native americans. For more info, go to http://nalc4all.org/ to check them out.

In all, Native American groups own about 4.2 percent of the land in the US.

There are 2 different methods of ownership. Often a tribe will hold all land in trust, but in many cases, as we will discuss later, the land was partitioned off and sold in plots during the allotment era. This land is owned by the individual indian, and whether or not it is considered part of a reservation varies according to the situation. Again, more on that later. There is also land on some reservations that is owned in fee title (absolute ownership) by non-NDNs. So any given area can be a patchwork of reservation/trust land/individual allotments/land owned by non-indians on a rez.. and as you will see, figuring out who has jurisdiction over an area or who pays taxes or can be prosecuted by who for what crimes... all can hinge on what kind of land it is and who is involved.

In some rezes, non-indian land predominates - it is in the majority. For example, 46% of the land within the boundaries of the Swinomish Rez in Washington is owned by non-indians, and 20 percent of the Indian trust land (beyond that 46%) is leased to non-NDNs. The whites GREATLY outnumber the NDNs on that rez. Weird, huh?

The 5 states with the most Indian land are Arizona, with a combined total of 20,718,125 acres of land, New Mexico, with 8,438,954 acres of land, Montana, with about 5.5 million acres, South Dakota with about 5 million acres, and Washington, with 2.637 million acres.

Tribes usually have jurisdiction over indian country - which includes all land within the exterior boundaries of a rez, and as such, their jurisdiction may extend to an area miuch larger than the area actually in Indian ownership. Questions arise - and we will get to this later - about who handles problems occurring on a rez on land owned within that rez by a non-indian. Who do you think should have jurisdiction? the US feds, the state, or the rez.. if the land is within a rez but not owned by an indian or tribal member?

Ok, moving on... Tribes own about 6.3 million acres of commercial timber land - or about 1% of the nation's total. Tribes are increasingly taking over the management of their timber lands.

And another 43 million acres, or 77% of NDN land is classified as range land, a LOT of which has been majorly overgrazed by animals. IN addition, most of that has been leased to non-NDNs. There are another 3 million acres of "indian" agricultural land, and again, the most productive of this is leased to non-NDNs. Because they often got crappy deals in negotiating prices, the benefits given to the NDNs for this land have often been pretty skimpy.

Indians also have extensive rights to water across the nation, (the Winters Doctrine - more on this in a few posts) and the indian water rights are technically usually superior to those of everyone else, but the problem is in enforcing that and in getting the infrastructure together to actually GET the water to where they want it.

There are also a minority of tribes that hold land that is rich in resources (think minerals for mining, etc.) and they are just starting to really get into developing their subsurface mineral rights and take advantage of this. But even here, the problem is that the "royalties" non-indians pay for the right to mine are collected by the MMS - minerals management services - which is part of the Department of the Interior, and is distributed to tribes and individuals by the BIA. Indian mineral holders earned more than 185 million dollars in royalties from mineral revenues in 2000.

And indians also have pretty strong fish and wildlife resources, and several tribes are now starting to get into recreational development - i.e. skiing lodges, etc, and developing things like the walkway over the Grand Canyon. (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070308/ap_on_re_us/canyon_skywalk)
This sort of recreational development of all sorts is also going to be an important source of money for the indians in the future.

Ok, next time? We'll talk more about economic development, and then hit on the tricky overview of "assimilation of indians"... then on to the cool stuff - CASES!