Burning prairies in Minnesota Land Recovery

Her face black with soot, Victoria Ranua strides across a Minnesota hillside, painting it with fire. What begins as a low thin strip of yellow, ignited by her torch, leaps behind her at once into a huge hedge of dancing flames, racing across dry prairie grasses.

The process, Ms. Ranua said, helps the native plants survive against invasive species brought by Europeans. Ms. Ranua works for the casino-enriched Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. In an area southwest of Minneapolis, the group is recovering land its ancestors once lost to European settlers and returning it to age-old looks and uses.

 

But the tribe’s land purchases, which are surging as the price of land sags, are turning up a different sort of heat in Scott County. Civic leaders in Shakopee say the pace and pattern of the tribe’s land buys — it has spent more than $100 million — are making planning a logistical nightmare in the fast-growing community.

They also think the tribe may be engaged in a shrewd chess game to block the city of Shakopee’s development plans, then move out into open countryside to start reacquiring vast stretches of ancestral land. It’s a question emerging from New York to California as tribes riding high on casino profits have begun spending that wealth to reassert control over ancestral land.

“It appears they’re out to garner as much as they can get, wherever they can get it,” Shakopee Mayor John Schmitt said. “They have the war chest to do that.”

The tribe’s original 250-acre reservation — best known today as the site of its Mystic Lake casino — has grown tenfold. Nearly 2,000 acres have been stockpiled since the early 1990s.

On the East Coast, the Oneida Nation is trying to place 17,000 acres in central New York State into federal trust, yanking it from the tax rolls and making it independent territory. Tribes are buying land all up and down the state of California.

“From an original 640 acres, we’ve probably purchased more than 3,000 additional acres,” said Adam Day, assistant tribal manager for the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation.

c Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service