Land Tenure and Livelihoods of the Oglala Lakota - Kathryn M ...

Stromberg 5
The belief that the U.S. federal and tribal governments significantly profited from the
leasing system was repeated again and again. A young man from Wounded Knee described how
the lease income "goes through the tribe and takes a while to get to us. It‟s pretty small, because
they all split it up too, so it goes six different ways too." A Porcupine man told me “you get these
administrative costs going from one post to the next post, and it gets smaller and smaller every
year. They raise the lease, but then my portion still gets smaller, and the tribe raises their
administrative costs. It‟s a no-win situation.” However, key informants, including a tribal official
and a retired land office official, reported that the administrative fees were minimal, and that
lease checks are so small chiefly due to fractionation.
Leasing has generational component. Many of the people I interviewed spoke of the same
ranchers using their land for decades. Landowners are given a chance to pull land out of lease as
notified by the B.I.A., every five years for a Range Unit. Having a large amount of owners can
complicate efforts to pull land out of lease, so the tract is typically kept in the system by default.
As one landowner said, "you have to wait until the five year term is up, and then you have to be
on the ball to intercept it. The bureau actually sends out a petition to you, to ask you if you want
to continue this lease, and if you don‟t respond, then the superintendent in this area will sign it
for you. They say, „this lease will renew in 30 days if either you don‟t sign this, or give us
permission to sign it for you." A tribal employee spoke about the lease on a few acres she shares
with several hundred relatives:
We weren‟t the ones to negotiate it. It's historic, it's almost like it clicks in to place
automatically and we don't have a say on our land…the lease is a generational lease. So
the grandma that leased this land from my grandparents. When they died, my dad and his
sisters inherited it, that lease followed them. And then when he passed away, that lease
followed that land, and it was for 25 years. When the lease expired, we weren't notified of
it. I wanted to know the exact date, so I could go in there and say, no, we‟re not interested
in leasing this land. They've had it in their family so long that they consider it theirs. And
I'm worried that they're going to start building on it because it's so close to the casino.