Gabriel Galanda: Buy-back program violates indigenous rights

Unfortunately, the Buy Back Program does not mark any improvement in federal Indian law or policy. To the contrary, that program runs counter to UNDRIP and other international human rights laws.

The most troublesome part of the program is that it will facilitate the forced sale of tribal members’ allotted or restricted fee lands, and, in turn, forcibly and permanently remove individual Indians from their ancestral lands. This was not the result of Interior oversight — Interior has spoken in code about this reality from day one. In 2012, the department articulated a strategy to “identify tracts with relatively low fractionation and a few ‘large’ interest owners, the acquisition of whose interests could bring a tribe to a controlling level of interest in that tract with a minimal number of acquisitions.” As is now clear, “controlling level of interest” referred to a mechanism in the federal Indian Land Consolidation Act (ILCA) that permits tribes that acquire a simple 51 percent majority interest in allotted or restricted fee lands to obtain the minority owners’ land interests by forced sale. 25 U.S.C. § 2204(a).

A year later, after folks began to crack Interior’s code, the agency proclaimed: “There will be NO forced sales.” But when pressed for a more honest answer during consultations with tribal governments in early 2013 — roughly an entire year after the Buy Back strategy was pronounced (hardly “meaningful collaboration with tribal officials” promised by the Obama administration — agency top brass were forced to admit that once Interior brings a tribe into a controlling 51 percent interest, the controlling tribe is empowered by federal law to force the sale of the remaining minority interest(s). In other words, the Buy Back Program equates to forced sales of individual Indian landholdings.