Babaamaajimowinan (Telling of news in different places)
A federal land acquisition program to benefit tribes will leave unrecovered 4 million acres of fractionated land, reservation land divided up and allotted to individual members, interests when it ends in 2022, according to the Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations’ 2016 Status Report released November 1.
That is, unless the Interior Department and Congress can find a way to extend the program and increase its funding by several billion dollars.
The copy.9 billion Land Buy-Back Program for Tribal Nations was established in 2012 as part of the 2009 settlement of a lawsuit against the federal government alleging it had mismanaged individual American Indian trust funds. So far, the program has paid out $900 million to purchase the equivalent of 1.7 million acres of land and put it under tribal, rather than individual, control.
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