By Chet Brokaw — Associated Press
PIERRE, S.D. (AP) – At least a small part of the once-huge Yankton Sioux Tribe’s reservation in southeastern South Dakota continues to exist and remains under the legal jurisdiction of the federal and tribal governments, a federal judge has ruled.
The state and Charles Mix County have long argued that the reservation was disestablished, or terminated, in the late 1800s.
But U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol of Sioux Falls sided with the tribe and the U.S. government in ruling that the reservation covers about 37,585 acres, or 59 square miles, which is mostly land the government holds in trust for the tribe and individual tribal members. An undetermined amount of land privately owned by American Indians also is included in the reservation, he said.
Piersol’s ruling, issued Dec. 19, was the latest in a 15-year-old legal dispute that has already included rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court and a federal appeals court.
The judge noted that the state has persisted in arguing that the Yankton Sioux reservation was terminated and the tribe has continued to argue that the reservation was not reduced. Those issues have been settled in prior court rulings that found the reservation has been diminished but not disestablished, Piersol said.
The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ordered Piersol to determine the extent of the remaining reservation after taking into consideration the rulings issued earlier by the appeals court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Piersol acknowledged that his decision creates a checkerboard in which parcels of Indian land under tribal and federal jurisdiction are scattered among land under state jurisdiction. But he said federal, state, county and city law officers in the area appear to have established a workable system for enforcing laws.
The judge also emphasized that the case involves legal jurisdiction and does not affect title to any land.
U.S. Attorney Marty Jackley said Piersol’s ruling confirms the Yankton Sioux Tribe’s legal right to its reservation.
”After the tribe and the United States were unsuccessful in their joint effort to enforce the original treaty boundaries, it was critically important to maximize the amount of land remaining in the diminished reservation,” Jackley said in a written statement.
South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long said state officials have not yet decided whether to appeal Piersol’s decision to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals. The state agrees with parts of the decision and disagrees with other parts, he said.
The lawyer representing the tribe, former U.S. Sen. James Abourezk, said the tribe also will decide later whether to appeal Piersol’s ruling. He said such an appeal would argue the appeals court made a mistake in an earlier ruling when it decided that land sold to non-Indians was not included in the reservation.
”The whole thing seems very unfair. The Yankton Sioux Tribe started out with 11 million acres back in the 1800s. The government came along and has talked them out of virtually all of it,” Abourezk said. ”It just seems very unfair to me the courts would let that happen.”
In an 1858 treaty, the Yankton Sioux Tribe gave up 11 million acres in exchange for cash and a 430,000-acre reservation, which once encompassed about 60 percent of Charles Mix County.
Congress passed a law in 1887 that allowed each tribal member to get 160 acres, and more than 260,000 acres were allotted to individual members of the tribe. Most of that land has since been sold to non-Indians.
The federal government agreed in 1894 to pay the tribe $600,000 for 168,080 acres that was to be opened to settlers.
A dispute over the status of the reservation began in 1992 when a regional landfill was proposed for construction in Charles Mix County.
A federal judge and the appeals court in St. Louis ruled that the reservation boundaries had not been diminished.
But the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that the 168,000 acres the tribe sold for non-Indian settlement under the 1894 law are no longer Indian lands and are under state jurisdiction. The high court did not decide whether Congress had intended to terminate the reservation, and it also did not decide the status of land allotted to individual Indians.
Piersol later ruled that the 260,000 to 270,000 acres allotted to individual Indians was still reservation land under jurisdiction of the tribe and federal government.
However, the appeals court in St. Louis ruled that the reservation still exists but does not include land once owned by individual tribal members but now owned by non-Indians. That left the status of 30,000 to 40,000 acres unsettled.
The appeals court said Piersol must decide the status of that land.
Piersol said the reservation includes 30,226 acres allotted to individual Indians that remains held in trust either for individuals or the tribe, 914 acres reserved for the government in an 1894 law and then returned to the tribe, 6,444 acres taken into trust under a 1934 law, and an undetermined amount of Indian-owned land that has continuously been held in Indian hands.