Top 5 takeaways of our investigation into state trust lands on reservations

Despite tribes’ status as autonomous, sovereign nations, lands on federal Indian reservations provide revenue to state governments to pay for public schools, jails, universities, hospitals, and other institutions. A new investigation from Grist and High Country News reveals that more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres within the boundaries of reservations are used to support public institutions and reduce the financial burden of taxpayers through the leasing of land for oil and gas operations, grazing, timber harvesting, and more.

Powered by publicly available data, this new investigation identifies the state institutions benefiting 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 detangle 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 pockmarked by more than 2 million acres of state trust lands.

State trust lands, on and off Indian reservations, make up millions of acres across the Western United States and generate revenue for public schools, universities, jails, hospitals, and other public institutions. Montana, for example, manages 5.2 million surface acres and 6.2 million subsurface acres, a term pertaining to oil, gas, minerals, and other underground resources, and distributed $62 million for public institutions in 2023 with the majority going to K-12 schools — institutions serving primarily non-Indigenous people. Approximately 161,000 acres are contained on six reservations. 

2 In at least four states, five tribal nations are themselves paying to lease land inside their own reservations — almost 58,000 collective acres.

Of all the Indigenous nations in the U.S. we identified that pay states to utilize their own lands, the Ute Tribe leases back the highest number of acres. And while not all states have publicly accessible lessee information with land-use records, of the ones that did, Grist and High Country News found that at least four other tribes also lease nearly 11,000 acres, combined, 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 tribally leased lands — 99.5 percent — are used for agriculture and grazing.

3 Fossil fuel infrastructure or activity is present on roughly a sixth of on-reservation trust lands nationwide. 

Beneficiaries, including public schools, receive revenue 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 split — if a tribe, for instance, owns the surface rights while an oil company owns the subsurface rights — the subsurface owner can access 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 awards since 2011. 

Tribal Climate Resilience awards are designed to fund and assist tribes in creating adaptation plans and conducting vulnerability and risk assessments as climate change increasingly threatens their homes. But with the existence of state trust lands inside reservation boundaries, coupled 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 for returning trust lands to Indigenous control and in other states, land exchanges have already occurred or are in-progress.

State agencies can exchange trust lands on reservations for federal lands off-reservation, 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 lands, and North Dakota, which is moving new legislation through Congress for the same purpose. But because of the lands’ value and the states’ financial obligations, it’s difficult to transfer complete jurisdiction back to Indigenous nations. Trust lands must be swapped for land of equal or greater value, which tends to mean that a transfer is only possible if the land in question doesn’t produce much revenue. 

Read the full story here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Top 5 takeaways of our investigation into state trust lands on reservations on Sep 16, 2024.