Taking Back the Land

Flames leap up 20 feet around her. White smoke curls into the air and the heat hits her face as Victoria Ranua torches Canada thistle, foxtail and reed canary grass. Ranua is a botanist on an unusual mission. She's trying to burn up any invasive weeds that European settlers brought with them in the 19th century, when they stampeded onto land once belonging exclusively to American Indians.

Ranua, who works for the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community near Minneapolis, is clearing the ground in a patch of suburban Shakopee to make way for big blue stem, prairie blazing star, purple coneflower and other native plants, which, she hopes, will lure back meadowlarks, raptors, voles and other creatures that once inhabited the territory. "If you're going to preserve the culture, you have to have a landscape," says Stan Ellison, the tribe's land manager. "The Dakota culture—especially the Mdewakanton, their food, their fiber, their spiritual relationships—were based on the land they lived on." The Sioux are also planting sage and sweetgrass as well as chokecherry and wild plum trees, which tribe members have used for generations for medicine and food.

To get back to the garden that existed before Europeans ravaged their lands, Native Americans are cultivating with an unnatural resource—casino riches. Across the country, Native American tribes are snapping up property with the cash that's flowing in from slot machines, blackjack tables and roulette wheels. Last year, tribal gaming revenue hit $27 billion. Since Native Americans won the right to build casinos on their reservations in 1988, the lucrative business has caught fire. Of the 562 federally recognized tribes, about 220 have gaming operations. And they're using their newfound fortune to invest in land for housing, businesses, farming, hunting and fishing grounds, grazing lands for cattle and buffalo—or simply returning it to the wild. With earnings from its Wildhorse Resort and Casino, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservations in northeast Oregon spent $20 million to acquire roughly 30,000 acres, about a third of which they are returning to its natural conditions, said Bill Tovey, the tribe's director of economic development. Part of the grounds harbor plants and roots the nation uses for ceremonial purposes. "If you don't have land, you don't have culture," he said. "You don't own your destiny."

That may be true, but many people who've arrived over the last century and a half see this Native American land grab as a drain on their tax base and powers of economic development. That's because tribal leaders are increasingly removing the land from tax rolls by placing it into federal trust. It's a perfectly legal maneuver dating to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act, passed to re-establish Native American parcels lost through legislation in 1887. That obscure law was invoked sparingly—until Native Americans had the wherewithal to go on a real-estate spending spree. Now government officials and critics are trying to fend off the Native American's land rush. "I don't think in the modern world it makes any sense to tie any individual rights to a tribal entity that is unaccountable," said David Vickers, president of Upstate Citizens for Equality in Verona, N.Y., an organization which disputes the notion of Native American sovereignty. "It's possible to maintain cultural identity without establishing a separate land base."

Vickers is part of a battle heating up in central New York state. Last week, the U.S. Department of the Interior sided with the Oneida Indian Nation of New York by allowing 13,004 acres owned by the nation to be put into a tax-free trust. The designation also makes the land an independent territory, subject to most federal laws but not all state, city or county regulations or taxes. The tribe—which operates the Turning Stone Resort and Casino, a golf course on the PGA Tour, gas stations, convenience stores, government buildings, a 1,200-head Angus beef farm and cultural facilities—said it planned no changes for the property.
That decision was the latest round in a long-running tussle. After the tribe bought land in the 1990s, the city of Sherrill, N.Y., tried to collect property taxes, and the two sides went to court. In March 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against the tribe but suggested that the land would be tax-exempt if it were in trust. In April 2005, the nation applied for trust status for almost all of its land holdings. In a ruling last week, the Interior Department said putting the land into trust would address the Oneida Nation's "need for cultural and social preservation and expression, political self-determination, self-sufficiency, and economic growth by providing a tribal land base and homeland."

To Kandice Watson, a member of the Oneida Wolf Clan, the ruling is a long overdue move to preserve her tribe's heritage. "The land is important so we can survive as a community," she said. "Seven generations from now we will still have an Oneida Nation here in central New York … We want to be able maintain our traditions and culture, including our language."