Tribes Buying Back Ancestral Lands
Maurice Lyons was a boy when white ranchers fenced a lush canyon in the heart of the Morongo Band of Mission Indians reservation to keep his people from sharing its game, pasturelands, wild grapes and sage.
"Back then, I hunted deer and rabbit in the canyon with a beat-up old single-shot .22 rifle," he recalled. "We didn't have anything else to live on in those days, so there were hard feelings about those fences."
Now, as chairman of one of the wealthiest casino-owning tribes in the state, Lyons is making a priority of buying back ancestral territory, starting with Millard Canyon, near Banning. It is part of an effort to consolidate the reservation -- a checkerboard of desert parcels about 100 miles east of Los Angeles -- and, even more important, fulfill a tribal longing to reclaim land that had been taken away.
Other casino-owning tribes up and down the state also are quietly buying property near their reservations as part of long-term economic development strategies, or merely to protect it from encroachment.
The advantages of owning a successful casino, tribal leaders say, are cultural as well as economic. In addition to paying for social services, infrastructure improvements, business investments and political donations, gambling operations help tribes reconnect to a fundamental aspect of their besieged past: land lost through tax sales, fraud and violence.
"It has long been an aspiration of tribes across America to reclaim their traditional lands in any way possible," said Victoria Bomberry, a professor of Native American studies at UC Riverside.
"During the early days of the Red Power movement in the 1960s, for example, tribal elders emphasized the importance of reclaiming that land," Bomberry added. "A lot of people who have come of age since then are now in a position to try to achieve that dream."
UCLA law professor Carole Goldberg would add, however, that it can be a costly dream.
"On one hand, the tribes are buying property with revenue provided by non-Indians, which seems to mitigate some of the unjustness of it all," she said. "But sellers know they have a unique commodity, and may raise prices dramatically to take advantage of the value that contiguous land has for Native Americans."
In many cases, the tribes aim to eventually take the acquired property into trust, a lengthy process that would ultimately insulate it from state and local laws by making it a part of their sovereign territory. Sometimes, however, tribal elders say, they are simply content to own the land.
