WASHINGTON - Many of the nation’s tribal leaders say President Barack Obama’s administration is moving far too slowly with a plan to spend $1.9 billion to buy back thousands of parcels of land that have been sold over the years on U.S. Indian reservations.
Congress signed off on the huge land buy in 2010 to settle a lawsuit, after royalties from Indian land never made it back to the tribes as promised.
Since the program officially launched in 2012, the Interior Department has focused the bulk of its work on just three tribes. It has made its first offers to landowners on the Makah reservation in Washington state and the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations in South Dakota. Appraisal work is underway on three other reservations in Montana.
But critics fear the department won’t have enough time to meet its goal of buying land for at least 150 tribes before the program expires in 2022.
“When you’re dealing with the federal bureaucracy, it isn’t enough, and tribes know that better than anybody. … We’re looking at eight years left, only three tribes down,” Michael Finley of Inchelium, Wash., chairman of the Colville tribe in Washington state, said in an interview.
As part of the settlement, Congress agreed to buy up to 10 million additional acres to hold in trust for U.S. tribes. That’s about twice the size of Massachusetts, making it the largest expansion ever proposed for the government’s tribal land trust, which now covers 46 million acres.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 04/21/2014