Unearthing Indian Land: Living with the Legacies of Allotment (review)

At the time of my great-grandfather's death in 1940, he had inherited interests in fifteen different allotments on Northern California's Round Valley Reservation. These inherited interests included one-third of his deceased wife's allotment as well as an absurd 2/135 and 2/405 interest in two other allotments. When one considers that allotments in Round Valley were either five, ten, fifty, sixty, or seventy acres (depending on whether the allotment was in the valley or mountains), one might conclude that my great-grandfather was "land poor." What could he do with a twentieth of an acre? These "fractionated allotments" are one of the many legacies of the federal government's misguided allotment policy. Anthropologist Kristin Ruppel investigates the history and contemporary controversies of fractionated allotments and the efforts of Native peoples to create a "post- or decolonized" land policy (4).

Fractionated allotments are one of the unintended consequences of the allotment policy. Enacted in 1887, the General Allotment Act surveyed reservations, distributed land to (usually) Indian heads of households, and put "surplus" lands into the public domain. Once allottees passed on, they bequeathed parts, or interests, in their allotments to other family members. As each generation passed on, the interests became smaller and smaller, with more heirs appearing on the scene. Today, fractionated allotments account for nearly one-fifth of American Indian trust land (106). The administration of these lands created several problems in Indian Country. When people inherited interests in allotments, they did not inherit the land, which was still held in trust by the federal government, but a percentage of the income generated from the allotments. In other words, my great-grandfather never had a twentieth of an acre; he inherited 2/405 of the income generated from the allotment. Since many allotments had multiple heirs living in different parts of the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) leased these allotments as part of its trust responsibility to Native peoples. Too often, the BIA mismanaged this responsibility: perhaps neglecting to increase lease rents in proportion to off-reservation land values, failing to solicit competitive bids for logging contracts, or failing to oversee the way in which logging companies harvested timber. Federal efforts to rectify the problems of fractionation only produced new and perplexing problems. The federal government desired to consolidate fractionated allotments in order to reduce its costs and make the allotments more economically viable entities for allottees or tribal governments. The Indian Land Consolidation Act (ILCA) of 1983 provided that if an individual interest was less than 2 percent and earned less than $100 per year, the interest automatically transferred to the tribal government (the 2 percent provision) (48-50). The Supreme Court twice declared this provision unconstitutional. When the federal government amended the act in 2000, it mandated that only "Indians" ("anyone who is a member of a tribe or is eligible to be a member of a tribe") could inherit trust land (210, note 62). This, too, seemed like an attack on tribal sovereignty and individual Indigenous rights. As advocate Helen Sanders declared, "They say only Indians can inherit trust land, and then they redefine who is an Indian. [The federal government] shouldn't be legislating inheritance. That's for the tribes to do" (61).

Native people have challenged the federal government to fulfill its mandate as part of the trust relationship and reduce its control over Indian land. On the Quinault Reservation, Sanders fought to assume more responsibility over her fractionated allotment. She secured a loan to start her own logging enterprise and then sued the secretary of the interior over the mismanagement of logging on the reservation. Ernestine Werelus spearheaded the creation of the Fort Hall Landowners Alliance, which attempted to oversee the BIA and tribal government on Idaho's Fort Hall Reservation. These women, and other men and women like them, have been at the forefront of efforts to educate Indian allottees as to their individual rights and to protect...