From New York to California, Indian tribes buying up land

Her face black with soot, Victoria Ranua strides across a Minnesota hillside, painting it with fire. What begins as a low thin strip of yellow, ignited by her torch, leaps behind her at once into a huge hedge of dancing flames, racing across dry prairie grasses.

The process, Ranua said, helps the native plants survive against invasive species.

"You know, Europeans didn't just come here as people," she said. "They brought their own plants and animals, and changed a lot of what was here."

Ranua works for the casino-enriched Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. In an area southwest of Minneapolis, the group is recovering, acre by acre, portions of the land its ancestors once lost to European settlers, and meticulously returning it to age-old looks and uses.

But the tribe's land purchases, which are surging as the price of land sags, are turning up a different sort of heat in Scott County. Civic leaders in Shakopee say the pace and pattern of the tribe's land buys -- it has spent more than $100 million -- are making planning a logistical nightmare in the fast-growing community.

And they wonder if the tribe is engaged in a shrewd chess game to block the city of Shakopee's development plans, then move out into open countryside to start reacquiring vast stretches of ancestral land. It's a question emerging from New York to California as tribes riding high on casino profits have begun spending that wealth to reassert control over ancestral land.

"It appears they're out to garner as much as they can get, wherever they can get it," Shakopee Mayor John Schmitt said. "And they have the war chest to do that."

For his part, Stan Ellison, the tribe's land manager, points to a pile of historic maps as a reminder of who, historically, interfered with whom.

"This land," he said, "was taken by the point of a gun -- and we are buying it back with American dollars."

The tribe's original 250-acre reservation -- in what is now Prior Lake and best known today as the site of its Mystic Lake casino -- has grown tenfold. Nearly 2,000 acres have been stockpiled since the early 1990s.

And that's a pittance compared with what's happening in other places. On the East Coast, the Oneida Nation is trying to place 17,000 acres in central New York State into federal trust, yanking it from the tax rolls and making it independent territory. Tribes are buying land all up and down the state of California.

"From an original 640 acres we've probably purchased more than 3,000 additional acres," said Adam Day, assistant tribal manager for the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, close to San Diego. "And what we do is, one by one we apply to bring (the land purchases) into trust."

Day said that dozens of other tribes are doing the same thing across California. "Throw a dart at a map of California and you'll hit one," he said.

Tribal leaders say they are just trying to knit scattered parcels into a cohesive base for future generations as they protect historically significant sites.

But Michael Leek, Shakopee's director of community development, and city administrator Mark McNeill wonder if that's all that's going on. They vividly remember a decade-old news article in which tribal chairman Stanley Crooks said he wanted to reclaim a vast region spanning parts of Wisconsin, Iowa, South Dakota and Minnesota:

Today tribal administrator Bill Rudnicki dismisses that as "a jest, taken out of context."

The threat of lost income to the county and cities -- offset, the tribe argues, by a multitude of donations and partnerships -- has long been the main focus of public unease about its land base.

In a game that Schmitt calls "one-upsmanship, if you will," the tribe is able to find out far more about the city's plans than the other way around and can acquire key pieces of land that block the city's growth plans far beyond that one point.

A main sewer line, buried 40 feet below ground, can cost $800,000 per half-mile. The tribe has bought a piece of land at the end of one such line. Even if the tribe allows the city to cross tribal land to serve a new neighborhood, who would pay for the extra length of the line, or pay the extra cost to reroute the sewer line?

In Scott County, the tribe and the city of Shakopee are heading to court over the tribe's desire to double its land in trust, to about 1,600 acres.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)