You don’t have to look further than Neal McCaleb’s Oklahoma back yard to see why his proposed rewrite of land-into-trust regulations gives us cause for concern. The Interior Department wants to retract and rewrite the Clinton administration’s version to give states and neighboring towns greater say in the process of returning land to tribal sovereignty. This, as they say, is like giving the fox more input in chicken coop management.
The southern Cheyenne and Arapaho near Fort Reno, Okla., can tell a story about local input. The tribes through their joint government have campaigned for years for the return of 7,000 acres the War Department took over in 1883 to set up Fort Reno. A primary purpose of the Cavalry outpost was to protect the Cheyenne and Arapaho Reservation from local horse thieves.
The land should have reverted to the tribes when the fort was decommissioned, say tribal lawyers, but townspeople in El Reno used all their political pull to block the return. Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla., inserted a rider against reversion in the last two appropriation bills.
In the meantime, locals lobbied for a new federal use that would tie up the lands. The Agriculture Department obliged with plans for primate rearing, genetic engineering and a biocontainment lab for quarantining mutant bacteria. The folks in El Reno would rather have 500 baboons and mutated germs for neighbors than Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians.
There’s a lot more to say about the Fort Reno case, but the point here is that locals just about everywhere in the country have the same reaction to Indian attempts to reclaim lost land. They will go to extreme, even irrational lengths to prevent it.
The neighbors offer a number of practical objections, to be sure, such as the loss of tax base and the expansion of Indian sovereignty, and tribal negotiators have done their best to address them.
In talks with three neighboring towns in southeastern Connecticut, the Mashantucket Pequots were even willing to open their reservation to local tax assessors and building inspectors. But even this major and probably unwise waiver of tribal sovereignty failed to placate their neighbors, who have gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in an unsuccessful attempt to block federal trust status for 165 acres that the Mashantuckets already own. The legal fees alone have probably eaten up a decade of the potential tax revenue from the land.
So what is the true source of this resistance? Perhaps the intensity comes from the knowledge that the acreage in question, and a lot more besides, was stolen from the tribe in the first place. Histories have been written about the way Oklahoma settlers used fraud and force to nibble away the 5 million acres that an 1869 treaty guaranteed to the Cheyenne and Arapaho. Some of the family names in the indexes are the same as those now opposing the Fort Reno reversion.
The officials of North Stonington stand out even in Connecticut for their anti-tribal hard line. They uphold a long tradition. In the 1660s, townsmen of Stonington forced the survivors of the Pequot War off 8,000 acres granted them by the General Court of Massachusetts, which at the time claimed jurisdiction. The leader of the Pequots complained in a formal petition about ‘such men that weare hats and cloathes like Englishmen, but hath dealth with us like wolves and bears.’
A later generation had the same problem. Pequots complained to the Connecticut General Assembly in 1749 that ‘sundry persons taking advantage of the Poverty and Ignorence of your Memorialists have frequently in a great variety of Ways and Manners grievously molested and interrupted them in their said occupation the numerous instances wherof are too tedious here to be enumerated.’ The complaints run right up to the mid-20th century, and they can be multiplied tribe by tribe.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Miller took note of this history in a famous statement in the 1886 case of U.S. vs. Kagama, ‘The tribes owe no allegiance to the states and receive from them no protection. Because of the local ill-feeling, the people of the states where they are found are often their deadliest enemies.’
The reality is that the arbitrary and often expressed era of ‘200 years ago,’ when, it is implied, American Indians lost much of their land and about which local opponents urge Indians to forget, remains very much in play. If you want to know how miserably Indians were treated in history, one need only read about events in places like El Reno and North Stonington today.
The land-into-trust process was set up in the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act as a belated and fitful redress of this long and tedious history. Since then it has returned about 9 million acres to trust status, only 10 percent of the 90 million acres the U.S. government took from tribes between 1887 and 1934. Restoration of the land base is a major goal for all levels of the Indian revival, from the economic to the spiritual. It also is a natural zone of conflict with the people who feel most threatened by and are hence most hostile to this resurgence.
A portion of McCaleb’s proposed revisions shows some awareness of local intransigence. It would require opponents ‘to show by clear evidence that the acquisition will result in severe negative impact to the environment or severe harm to the local government.’ This burden of proof may even be higher than that imposed on the tribes. Interior also says it would expedite applications for individual home sites. Maybe we will hear more reassurance about the details of the new regulations in the comment period, which runs to Sept. 12.
But forgive us for expressing concern when McCaleb and Interior Secretary Gale Norton say they want to rewrite the rules because of their impact on state and local governments. Indian country rightfully must wonder about such an emphasis. Judging from history, the impact on the tribes ought to be their bigger worry. It is most certainly their responsibility.
