Despite tribes’ status as autonomous, sovereign nations, lands on federal Indian reservations provide revenue to state governments to pay for public schools, prisons, universities, hospitals and other institutions. A new investigation by Grist and High Country News reveals that more than 2 million surface and underground acres within the boundaries of reservations are being used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden on taxpayers by leasing land for oil and gas operations, grazing, timber harvesting, and more.
Driven by publicly available data, this new investigation identifies the government institutions that profit from these lands, and provides information on many of the individuals and companies that lease them. In the second major story in our series on state trust lands, we continue to disrupt the ways in which Indigenous lands and resources bankroll public institutions, often at the expense of tribal citizens, Indigenous land management practices, and tribal sovereignty and self-determination.
Here are five takeaways from our investigation, which you can read in full here:
1 79 reservations in 15 states are characterized by more than 2 million acres of state trust land.
State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, cover millions of acres across the western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, prisons, hospitals and other public institutions. Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million underground acres, a term that refers to oil, gas, minerals and other underground resources, and distributed $62 million to public institutions in 2023 with the majority going to K-12 schools go – institutions that primarily serve non-native people. About 161,000 acres are contained on six reservations.
2 In at least four states, five tribal nations pay themselves to lease land within their own reservation – nearly 58,000 collective acres.
Of all the Native nations in the US we identified that pay states to use their own lands, the Ute tribe leases back the largest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible tenant information with land use records, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres together on their own reservations: the Southern Ute Tribe, Navajo Nation, Pueblo of Laguna and Zuni tribe. According to state records, the vast majority of these tribal lease lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.
3 Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on approximately one-sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide.
Beneficiaries, including public schools, receive income generated from a variety of activities, including leases for roads and infrastructure, solar panel installations and commercial projects. On reservations where states manage subsurface rights, land ownership can be divided—for example, if a tribe owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights—the subsurface owner can have access to its resources regardless of what the surface owner wants.
4 Of the 79 reservations that have state trust lands within their boundaries, tribes living on 49 of them have received federal Tribal Climate Resilience grants since 2011.
Tribal Climate Resilience Grants are designed to fund and assist tribes to create adaptation plans and conduct vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands within reservation boundaries, along with state-driven resource extraction, many tribal governments face hard limits when trying to enact climate mitigation policies — regardless of how much money the federal government puts toward the problem.
5 Some states are attempting to create systems to return trust lands to indigenous control and in other states land exchanges have already taken place or are underway.
State agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal land that is not reserved, but the process is complicated by the state’s obligation to produce as much money as possible from trust lands for its beneficiaries. At the forefront are Washington, which is currently implementing legislation to return land, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation for the same purpose through Congress. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it is difficult to transfer full jurisdiction back to indigenous nations. Trust lands must be exchanged for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question does not produce much income.
Read the full story here.
