Tribe pursues pilot project

COEUR d'ALENE - The Coeur d'Alene Tribe is hoping to get in on a federal pilot project that is being designed to help tribes across the nation repurchase reservation trust land.

The U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the U.S. Department of the Interior met with several tribes in Seattle on Wednesday to discuss how it plans to spend $1.9 billion in settlement money.

Three years ago, Congress agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by Elouise Cobell. Cobell sued the government for mismanaging a land lease program it oversees on reservation trust land.

According to Helo Hancock, legislative director for the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, the BIA manages all private leasing of reservation trust lands that were used for things like farming, logging and ranching.

For instance, he said, if a private farmer wanted to lease a tribal member's property, the farmer would have to secure the lease through the BIA. The BIA was supposed to collect the lease payment from the farmer and then turn around and pay that lease fee to the tribal members who own the property.

"But the tribal members were not getting their money," Hancock said. "When Cobell sued, the feds didn't know where the money was.

"That would never have happened with any other ethnicity. If it had it would have been all over the media, but not in Indian country, I guess."

Rather than go to trial, Hancock said the government decided to settle the suit out of court with a $1.9 billion reservation buy-back program, which has been dubbed the Cobell Settlement Program.

The money can only be used to purchase reservation trust land, and does not affect the fee lands on the reservation.

Trust land is land that was given to tribal families under the General Allotment Act of 1887. Prior to the passage of that act, the federal government simply created reservations by treaty or executive order for the use and enjoyment of specific tribes across the country, Hancock said.

"Then they wanted to assimilate tribes and that is when they passed the allotment act," he said. "Each family received either 80 or 160 acres, and what was not allotted was opened to homesteading."

The homestead properties are now called fee lands, and the land allotted to tribal members is considered trust land.

Hancock said by 1935 anything that wasn't homesteaded and all of the tribal allocated land was placed in trust by the federal government.

Ownership of the land was still in the hands of tribal members, but when the elders who originally owned the lands passed on, their ownership interest was usually split between the spouse and the children.

"Back then nobody really left a will, so the land was split up between family, and now some of those parcels have hundreds, if not thousands of owners," Hancock said. "You could have an 80-acre parcel with 275 owners."

A problem arises when the family wants to lease the land to a rancher or farmer.

"The BIA has to track down and collect the signatures from those 275 land owners," Hancock said. "Then they have to send lease payment checks to 275 land owners."

The Cobell Settlement Program is designed to consolidate ownership in those trust properties, and to make the trust system operate more efficiently.

"The settlement is also a way to reduce the liability to the federal government because they can't get it right," he added.

What the BIA wants to do with the pilot program now is to use a formula system it developed to help some of the tribes that have the most fractured trust land ownership issues. The fee properties, or homesteaded properties, are not eligible for the program, Hancock said.

Hancock said the Coeur d'Alene Tribe is not initially in on the pilot program, but they would like to be.

"We have a program in place already to buy back these properties in almost the same way," Hancock said. "We could be a model."

Hancock said the Tribe has a list of almost 100 properties that have fractured ownership, and all of those owners are willing sellers.

Some of the owners only have 1/100th of an acre, and that doesn't amount to much. The Tribe also has records on the ownership of those properties. That is something BIA is struggling with, Hancock said.

"So we asked them to let us be the model for the tribes," he said, adding there is no official timeline to launch the pilot, so they are hopeful their proposal will be considered.

The Tribe's proposal was well received, he added.

"We got positive feedback, and they are willing to work with us," he said. "They are impressed with the uniqueness of our program.

"We'll see how it goes."