Now in his seventies, Keller George, an Oneida New York tribal member who represents his clan on the tribal council, remembers well a time when entire generations of Oneidas grew up on non-tribal land, always dreaming of the day they could return once more to their ancestral territory.

“I had the privilege of knowing my great-grandmother, who died at the age of 101,” George said. “I was with her for 16 years and learned a lot from her. Her desire was always to see the Oneidas returned to their homeland. She lived on the Onondaga Indian reservation. That’s where my grandmother was born and raised, and she died at 97. She was born in 1885, and she never lived on Oneida land throughout her entire life.”

Even George’s own mother, who died just three years ago at the age of 96, never lived on Oneida land, although she lived to see the day when her people began to slowly reclaim what the tribe says is theirs by right of treaty with the U.S. government.

“She had the opportunity to come back for our elders’ dinners and things like that and was absolutely amazed by what we had done,” George said of his late mother. “Even though she didn’t live here, she was so proud that Oneidas now are living on their original lands. It means so much to our people to be able to do that.”

For the first time almost since initial contact by European settlers, Indian tribes today are beginning to reclaim lands lost to them through generations of neglect, federal paternalism and an allotment system that stripped tribal governments of their traditional territories.

 And while for close to 300 years, Indian peoples faced ever diminishing prospects for keeping and maintaining their land resources, the tide finally seems to have turned. Thanks to gaming dollars, many tribes have been able to reclaim their lands. But is the source of the revenue which allows tribes to accomplish this goal the very thing that makes the process of reclaiming their land more difficult?

Several gaming insiders say yes: Ironically, the development of tribal government gaming has made the process by which tribes have land taken into trust by the federal government more difficult.

“Has it gotten a little bit harder? Yes, it’s gotten harder,” said Ron Olson, a Sisseton Wappeton Sioux tribal member who is CEO of the economic development corporation for the Grand Traverse Band of Ottowa and Chippewa Indians in Michigan. “It’s more difficult because of the fact that there’s gotten to be a lot more casino operations around the country and you certainly have the conservatives saying, ‘Enough is enough’ or ‘I don’t want it in my backyard. It was okay when it was sitting in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t mind it. It didn’t bother me. I didn’t have to see it. But [not] now that they want to put one in my backyard or right in town.’”

Olson said that many tribal members have become astute businesspeople since the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (IGRA) in 1988, and they realize “that location is going to drive revenue. Common sense will tell you that if you have a chance to put a casino next to a population base, certainly you’ve got to pursue it. If I’ve got a choice of one or two locations, I’m going to put it in the best location possible to drive the most amount of revenue.

“But like most things, people do not want some big-box store operation in their backyard, and that makes it more difficult for tribes to take land into trust, whether for gaming or other purposes.”

It doesn’t help matters at all that there have been several highly-publicized proposals by tribes with long-established lands in one state attempting to acquire territory in another location several states away. Few of these proposals have gone anywhere as yet, but the attention they’ve drawn in the media has tainted some other efforts by tribes to acquire land for non-gaming purposes.

Among the most attention-getting proposals were those by members of the Delaware Tribe of Oklahoma to take land into trust in the Hudson River Valley of New York or in Eastern Pennsylvania. According to some Indian rights proponents, these controversial attempts to bring land into trust only added to uninformed public opinion about “rich Indians” with “big per capita” payments.

A MATTER OF TRUST

Keller George

Tribal trust lands are held in trust by the United States government for the use of a tribe. For decades – even centuries – far more land was lost to tribes than went into trust for them. The advent of gaming provided the hard dollars that allowed tribes to repurchase old ancestral lands and apply to the government to have the land taken into trust for them.

“Up through the 1980s you had far more land going out of trust than into trust,” said a source who was involved with Indian legislation on Capitol Hill. “In the last 15 to 20 years it’s pretty much evened out… A lot of tribes have in the last few years expended a great deal of effort to reacquire lands within reservation boundaries.”

According to IGRA, any land that had been taken into trust by a tribe prior to October 17, 1988 (the date of the enactment of IGRA) could conceivably be used for the development of gaming operations. Any land taken into trust after that date was considered “after-acquired lands” and – if planned for gaming usage – had to be approved for that purpose by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Among the criteria the BIA used to determine if site could be approved for gaming was whether it would be beneficial to the tribe and whether or not it would be detrimental to the surrounding community.

When successful gaming operations began springing up in states like California, Michigan, Minnesota and Connecticut, the BIA found itself besieged with requests to take land into trust, for both gaming and non-gaming purposes. Today there is a huge backlog of land-into-trust cases wending their way through Interior.

“But a lot of [tribally owned property] stays in fee [non-trust] status because it takes so long to get through the [BIA] process,” the Capitol Hill source said. “If all those applications could be processed within a matter of a year or so, for a few years at least you would see a significant increase.

“It wouldn’t be millions of acres. It wouldn’t be a large percentage increase. But you would certainly see several thousands of acres per year, if the Bureau would process these things in a timely manner.  It would certainly exceed the amount of land going out of trust.”

Recently the Oneida Nation of New York succeeded in having 13,000 acres of land taken into trust for them by the federal government, land upon which most of the tribe’s lucrative gaming resort had already been developed.

“It means everything,” tribal member George said when asked about the importance of having the land taken into trust. “Without land, what are you sovereign over? Without people, what are you sovereign over? Without the land, the people aren’t going to stay here.

“We’ve made so many advances since 1993, but having the land allowed us to bring numerous people back to our homeland, build houses and a cultural center and a gymnasium and amenities for our children and re-establish our ceremonies and games. That’s what it means.”

A comparatively smaller tract of land is currently under consideration by Interior as potential trust land for the Grand Traverse Band, 145 acres of property near the tribe’s Turtle Creek casino.

“That would allow us future economic development there.” Olson said. “We’re in the last comment period with this land going into trust. We’ve been working on this for several years and we’re finally moving forward.”

Olson said the tribe is confident the local community will throw up few roadblocks to the tribe’s plans.

“The 30-day comment for the local government is up on June 23 and now I understand there’s another 30-day comment period for local residents. After that, the bureau will make their final ruling on whether to take it into trust. We feel pretty confident that that’ll move forward sometime in August for us.”

Where many tribes across the country have faced local opposition to land-trust issues, Olson said, “The community here is pretty supportive. We have meetings with the community leaders periodically just to keep them abreast of what we’re doing and answer any questions they may have.

“So we’ve made a pretty good effort over the last couple of years to try to have an open line of communication between us and the community. So we feel pretty confident that the governments will support us and now we’re just looking for what the local residents may say.”

Like many successful gaming tribes, the Grand Traverse have in recent years been able to purchase large pieces of property surrounding their gaming operations, “fee” property which largely remains on the local tax roles and is not considered reservation land by the federal government.

“There is about 985 acres that we still have not taken into trust,” Olson said. “So we really don’t have a lot of land into trust. We do have other parcels that we’re working with the Bureau to try to take into trust for housing. It’s just been a very slow process, much like [for] every other tribe in the country.”

As for the 145 acres currently under consideration by Interior, Olson said, “that is very important because of the fact that as the economy gets weaker in Michigan and as competition continues to grow with sister tribes, certainly we’re looking at other economic diversification that we can do with this 145 acres, whether we put in retail or whether we put in warehousing space.

“Certainly,” he continued, “whatever we put in there is either going to be driving a piece of the economic engine or it will be a support for the casino. In order to maintain our revenues, we feel we need to do something with those 145 acres other than gaming. And we’re pushing that way.

“So yeah, it is important for us,” he concluded. “It will help fuel economic growth and revenue that the tribe badly needs to utilize for their social services and other programs. Like most tribes, gaming drives a majority of the revenues coming into the tribe, so we’ve got to do what we can to protect that revenue source and enhance it.”

Despite the Oneida New York’s success in having so many thousands of acres converted into trust lands, George said it is far more difficult today to take land into trust than it had been prior to IGRA’s passage.

“Overall, the attempts by tribes to go off-reservation does make it harder for all of the tribes to take land into trust for gaming or for whatever reason – from building a medical hospital or a clinic or more housing or whatever,” he said.

There are cases where tribes have been waiting years and years to get land into trust. “I know one case where a tribe has been waiting 12 years to take land into trust,” George said.

LOOKING AHEAD

The slow pace of Interior’s trust approvals is a seemingly endless source of frustration among tribal members said observers, complicated, as ever, by the casino question. But for tribes like the Oneida New York, the focus remains on the acquisition of tribal land despite the obvious frustrations of dealing with government bureaucracies.

“I wrote a letter that was going to be put into a time capsule at the Native American Studies program at Cornell University about 10 years ago,” George said. “I wrote this letter to future generations about what I wanted them to know. We talked about the land, which is so sacred, so important for the survival of our Indian people and that we hoped that even unto the seventh generation that it would be taken care of.

“We view the maintenance of our land and culture as a responsibility to that seventh generation, the unborn faces that are coming beneath the ground that one day will walk the pathway that we have walked — we can make it a better way for them,” he added.

“That’s exactly what we’ve done. That’s exactly what all this is all about. It’s not for me today. It’s not for just my children. It’s for those seven generations to come, those unborn faces that one day are going to walk this earth.

“It has to be there for them to survive as Oneida people. It has to be.”