The Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe is in a land dispute with Morrison County and two of its townships that has dragged on for years.
In two separate purchases, in 1994 and 2001, the Band bought five square miles of land adjoining its historical reservation boundaries. The land is undeveloped and has no building, according to court filings made available by the Turtle Talk blog. The Band uses the land for hunting and gathering.
The Band applied to the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) to transfer the land from “fee status” to federal “trust status”. That means the Band would not have to pay property taxes.
The Bois Forte Band of Chippewa acquired 28,000 acres of land within its traditional reservation boundaries this month, in what Native News Online describes as “the largest land-back agreement in Minnesota and one of the largest-ever in Indian Country.”
“The Bois Forte Band plans to directly manage the restored lands under a forest management plan that emphasizes conservation and environmental protection, balanced with economic and cultural benefits to the Band and its members,” the article said.
The headlines are calling this “historic” or that the tribe is “celebrating” the return of land. While true, this land-back story deserves context: An explanation of why Bois Forte needed to get its land back in the first place.
Part I discussed why blood quantum rules, often a criteria for Tribal citizenship, are seen as an existential Tribal threat. Part II discusses constitutional reforms to change that rule.
John Collier, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, meets with South Dakota Blackfoot Indian chiefs in 1934 to discuss the Indian Reorganization Act. Photo: Unknown
To recap Part I: The 1887 Dawes “General Allotment” Act was devastating to Native Nations, an assimilation policy that imposed private land ownership and capitalism on communal societies centered around reciprocity. The law broke up community-held Tribal lands into small parcels and allotted them to individual Indians and families.
The Allotment era ended with the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, an effort to reverse such assimilation policies.
Passed under FDR’s administration, it’s referred to as the Indian New Deal. (It’s still the basis for federal law regarding Indian affairs.)
The Indian New Deal stopped allotments, restored Tribal land management, and sought to strengthen inherent Tribal sovereignty. It encouraged Tribes to write their own constitutions.
Today, roughly 70 percent of Tribal constitutions define citizenship using the colonial idea of blood quantum, according to attorney Gabe Galanda, a member of the Round Valley Indian Confederation of Northern California.
As Tribal members have intermarried with people from other Tribes or non-Indigenous people, children’s blood quantum often drops below the threshold to be considered a Tribal member.
Native Nations are wrestling with whether to eliminate blood quantum rules.
On this day in history, May 8, 1906, Congress passed the Burke Act, which became another vehicle for white settlers to get Indian-owned lands. Continue reading →
On this day in history, Congress passed the Dawes Act which both forced indigenous peoples to assimilate into a system of private property ownership and effectively stole millions of acres of what should have been treaty-protected lands.
The Dawes Act allowed the government to divide up communally held reservation lands into individual parcels, up to 160 acres for a head of household, according to Wikipedia.
The law’s deceit was that there was plenty of acreage left over after individual allotments were made. The law allowed the government sell off this so-called “surplus” land.
On this day in history, Congress passed the Dawes Act which both forced indigenous peoples to assimilate into a system of private property ownership and effectively stole millions of acres of what should have been treaty-protected lands.
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