Indianz.Com > News > ‘Keep your promise’: Coquille Tribe still waiting on restoration of homelands
‘Keep your promise’
Coquille Tribe still waiting on restoration of homelands in Oregon
Wednesday, December 6, 2023
Indianz.Com
The Biden administration is promising to make it easier for tribes to restore their homelands and for one Indian nation in the Pacific Northwest, the initiative couldn’t come soon enough.
For more than eight years, the Coquille Tribe has been waiting for an answer on its fee-to-trust application in Oregon. The lengthy effort has stretched through three U.S. presidents — including one that canceled work on it altogether for unclear reasons.
“I went through the Obama administration, the Trump administration and now the Biden administration,” Chairperson Brenda Meade said in an interview. “And my ask is going to continue.”
“Allow us the process that we are allowed by Congress,” Meade said. “Keep your promise — for once — to the Coquille people.”
For the Coquille Tribe and its gaming project, the promise is easier said than done, as Haaland is facing immense pressure to reject the application. Most of the opposition coming from Indian nations in Oregon and California, whose leaders fear a new casino will harm their existing operations in the two neighboring states. “My people will suffer severe negative consequences if Interior’s free market policy is carried out as proposed,” said Chairman Russell Attebery of the Karuk Tribe. “Our tribe only has one casino,” Attebery said of the facility in northern California, about 54 miles from the Coquille site across the border in Oregon. “We recently opened it after years of challenges. Now we might be forced to close it because another tribe wants a second casino in a place outside of their historic lands.” But Haaland is also confronting intense pressure from a surprising contingent: members of her own party. Democratic members of Congress from Oregon, California and Washington, as well as Democratic politicians from those states, have been bombarding Interior with statements of opposition since 2022, underscoring the dilemma the Cabinet secretary faces with a project that would fulfill a promise to one tribe even as it impacts others in ways they do not accept. “Under your leadership, this administration has taken historic steps to support tribal nations and Native communities,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) wrote in a December 1 letter to Haaland. “We appreciate your commitment to upholding the federal government’s trust and treaty responsibilities and commitment to advancing equity—both for and among tribes.” the Oregon Democrats continued. “A decision to give an advantage to one restored tribe at the expense of so many other tribes would stand in stark contrast to that commitment.” The BIA closed the comment period on the draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Coquille Tribe’s fee-to-trust application and gaming project on February 23. Two virtual public hearings were held as the agency took comments about the effort — some seven years after an “notice of intent” was published during the Barack Obama administration, way back in 2015. During the Donald Trump administration, the BIA abruptly stopped the process — in September 2020, not long before the presidential election that Joe Biden went onto win. Chairperson Meade said the action came as a complete surprise to the tribe. “We were still doing the environmental work,” Meade told Indianz.Com. “So it was out of out of left field.” Then, a couple of months after Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland of the Department of the Interior held a listening session with Oregon tribes, the BIA announced the resumption of the process. Meade attended the meeting in October 2021, as did Democratic Sen. Merkley. “When the Biden administration came in, we asked them to look at this process that we have, because we didn’t believe that it was at a decision point,” Meade said, referring to the unusual nature of the cancellation of the EIS. “The Biden administration agreed with us and they said, ‘you have every right to a process,'” Meade added. “And that’s what we’ve always said: ‘Please make a decision on the law, please make a decision on the applicable requirements.'”“We put over 300,000 acres in trust in three years”: Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland (Bay Mills Indian Community) says President Joe Biden committed to making land-into-trust process easier for tribes. @USIndianAffairs @ncai1944 #NCAI80 @AsstSecNewland pic.twitter.com/KPj7qfiKBD
— indianz.com (@indianz) November 13, 2023
Final Fee-to-Trust Land Acquisitions Rules. DOI will announce the publication of its final rule amending the process that governs fee-to-trust land (or “land into trust”) process for Tribal Nations to expand their land bases by transferring land title to the United States to be held in trust for the benefit of an individual Indian or Tribe, including in Alaska. This process is crucial for Tribal economic development and Tribal sovereignty, and helps right the wrongs of past federal policies such as allotment, which removed millions of acres of land from Tribal ownership and federal protection. DOI’s final rule creates a more efficient, less cumbersome, and less expensive fee-to-trust process, including for conservation purposes.
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