Under President Obama, Indian tribes have added almost 400,000 in tribal trust land. The administration has the goal of putting a total of 500,000 into trust before Obama leaves office.
By comparison, the administration of President George W. Bush put 233,000 into trust.
About 525,000 acres that tribes have requested to put into trust are awaiting decisions by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
John Dossett, general counsel to the National Congress of American Indians told the Oneida Dispatch, “This administration has really heard from tribes that the process is much too slow,” Dossett said. “It can certainly be better, though. It should happen much, much faster.”
The total amount of Indian reservation lands is about 56 million acres, which, says Dossett, is about the size of Minnesota.
Putting land that Indian tribes have purchased into trust can be controversial since it removes it from the tax rolls and from the jurisdiction of the state and local governments, making it sovereign.
C. Matthew Snipp, director of the Native American studies program at Stanford University, told the Dispatch, One way of looking at this is that this is just a process of righting past wrongs, and for local governments, what goes around, comes around.”
Lana Marcussen of Citizens Equal Rights Alliance, a group that opposes some recent fee to trust decisions by the federal government, seeks to “change federal Indian policies that threaten or restrict the individual rights of all citizens living on or near Indian reservations.”
Says Marcussen, “If the federal government has the legal authority to rewrite what the process was supposed to be it has the legal authority to change all the rights to everyone else too.”
