Rep. Rob Bishop, chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, is tired of off-reservation gaming approvals by the Interior Department and wants to “suspend or freeze” several that were approved by the Obama administration in what Bishop considers to have been unseemly haste.
Bishop has called on the new administration to freeze the decisions on possibly seven gaming projects “until each has been thoroughly examined and resolved on its merits,” in a letter he sent three weeks into the new administration.
The paperwork for the applications is difficult to locate, but they reportedly relate to the Chickasaw, Cherokee, Shawnee, Wilton Rancheria and the Coquille Indian Tribe.
Bishop wrote, “While the full range of troubling determinations and actions are not yet known, Committee staff has identified several examples of last-minute approvals of Indian casinos located outside existing reservations,” adding, “any action should be scrutinized as well because of the precedent they may set for future actions.
In one case, Acting Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Michael S. Black approved a fee-to-trust application for a casino even though his immediate predecessor, then Deputy Assistant Secretary Lawrence Roberts, was aware of allegations of conflicts-of-interest involving Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA) processing of the application.” Bishop also wrote “In another case, a decision was made over the objection of other Indian tribes.”
Jody Cummings, former deputy solicitor of Indian Affairs for the Obama administration told Indian Country Today that it is likely that under Trump it will be harder to put land into trust, particularly decisions involving off-reservation tribal requests, which some critics call “reservation shopping.”
Earlier this month Acting Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Michael S. Black announced that all future off-reservation land applications would be assigned to a central office of the Bureau. Previously such requests were handled by regional officials.
This will create a bottleneck, asserts Cummings.
“My sense is that this change may be this administration slowing things a bit to get a better sense as to where fee-to-trust will land in its list of Indian policy priorities, and whether resources that would be devoted to making such decisions are needed elsewhere. While homeland restoration was a huge priority for our team, that may not be the case for the Trump administration,” he told Indian Country Today.
Bishop recently annoyed many tribes with his proposed Public Lands Initiative, which would have transferred 100,000 acres of the Ute Tribe’s reservation in Utah to the state for developing fossil fuels. The bill died in December.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has yet to express an opinion on off-reservation gaming. President Trump has not yet nominated a new Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs.
