Nebraska tribe pays $65K a year to rent land on its own reservation. It wants it back.

There's a map tacked up on the wall in Kameron Runnels' office – squared lines and small text showing who owns what pieces of the Santee Sioux reservation.

Six of the squares, big chunks of land, are labeled the same: "school land."

Runnels, the tribe's vice chairman, said he always wondered what exactly that meant. Two of the squares are colored in green – land the tribe pays the state almost $65,500 per year to rent and farm, even though it's within reservation boundaries.

When Nebraska was founded in 1867, the "school land" was set aside by Congress to generate money for its public schools, 15 years before the Santee Sioux reservation was officially established.

Today, the plots – including more located across Nebraska – are managed by the Board of Educational Lands and Funds, a state entity that leases out the land to help fund public schools. Those parcels on the Santee Sioux reservation generate about $140,000 a year in rent, with nearly half coming from the tribe itself.

And the tribe, it turns out, sometimes pays thousands more for the right to farm this school land.

The last time a parcel on the reservation came up to be re-leased, the tribe paid a $35,000 bonus bid, on top of its annual rent, said Mike Crosley, the tribe's longtime land manager.

Leaders like Crosley and Runnels hope that at some point, the State of Nebraska will transfer the land to the tribe, similar to what is happening in other states. The tribe has prioritized reclaiming lost reservation land in recent years, often paying aggressively.

But more immediately, Crosley's concerned that when the current lease expires in November the new one could be shorter, meaning more frequent bidding and bonus payments.

Board of Educational Lands and Funds CEO Kelly Sudbeck said the board is required to act in the best interest of generating money for the K-12 school system. If there's hot competition for land, like in Knox County, they may shorten the lease length.

At that last lease auction, Crosley and tribal council members went outside for a break. He asked if they should keep bidding.

"God dang, it's a b****. This was all our land," a council member told him. "We need it back."

Land loss

As a condition of Nebraska's statehood, the federal government granted generally section 16 and 36 of each township in the state in trust for schools. At the time, the land totaled nearly 2.9 million acres.

Now, over 150 years later, the Board of Educational Lands and Funds still controls 1.25 million acres in Nebraska, though more than half its original land has been sold to private sector owners.

On the Santee Sioux reservation, the board still owns 2,337 acres in total, about 2% of the total reservation, according to data obtained through a national investigation by Grist, a nonprofit media organization.

In total, Grist found more than 2 million surface and subsurface acres on 79 reservations across 15 states, including Nebraska, being used to generate revenue for public institutions.

The land wasn't taken away from an established reservation when it was initially given to the board in 1867, Sudbeck said, because the reservation wasn't there yet. Sections 36 and 16 of each township were excluded from the Santee Sioux reservation in the 1882 treaty that later officially established it.

But the Santee people had already been living in the area by the mid-1860s, Runnels said, after being forcibly removed from Minnesota following the U.S.-Dakota war and later leaving Crow Creek, South Dakota, where they had struggled to survive.

A bluff along the Missouri River, called Maiden's Leap, reminded tribe members of their Minnesota homelands, and they decided to stay. Driven away from the town of Niobrara by hostile white settlers, they moved into the Bazile Creek region around 1866, Runnels said, an area that would later become the reservation.

In 1868, the Fort Laramie Treaty established the Great Sioux Reservation, which spread from South Dakota into Nebraska and neighboring states. That reservation did not have school trust lands. The treaty was later broken by the U.S. government when it seized the Black Hills.

Government officials debated removing the Santee from northeast Nebraska, Runnels said, delaying the creation of a permanent reservation and causing confusion as tribe members tried to farm and build homes.

"If it wasn't for the scheming and secret conversations from the federal agents about trying to continue to remove our ancestors elsewhere, our reservation would have been established much earlier than it officially was, in my opinion," Runnels said.

By the time the 1882 treaty was signed, ceding the Great Sioux Reservation and establishing the much smaller, present-day Santee Sioux reservation, Nebraska was 15 years old, and the land had been given to the board.

Federal law excluded existing reservations from school trusts, giving states equivalent land elsewhere. Nebraska's other large reservations, Winnebago and Omaha, were established before the state itself, so the board got equal land outside of those reservation boundaries, Sudbeck said.

The board also does not own any land on the Iowa or Sac and Fox reservations, which are partially located in Nebraska.

To rent

Competition for good farmland in Knox County is aggressive, said Tad Judge, the board's field representative. There's a section outside of the reservation that recently went for a bonus bid, a one-time payment at a public auction to win a lease, of over $100,000.

For its last lease renewals, the Santee Sioux Nation paid bonus bids of $41,000 and $35,000 each, according to records provided by the board.

The tribe's bonus bid payments are similar to those for land of comparable size and quality elsewhere in the northeastern region of the state, Judge said, especially in recent years, when farmland and commodity prices have risen.

One of the tribe's current leases is on a seven-year cycle, the other is on 10, Crosley said. He's afraid of more frequent bonus bids if those leases are shortened.

By statute, the board's lease lengths can be anywhere from five to 12 years. That's longer than the average lease to a private owner, Judge said. In Knox County, he usually keeps lease lengths around seven to eight years.

But the board does consider demand, and competition could lead to shorter leases. Both Judge and Crosley said that neighbors and cattlemen looking to expand have shown up at auctions for the plots the tribe currently leases.

"Everybody's after land," Crosley said. "It's just like the gold rush days again up here, as far as land."

They're good sections, Judge said, well-managed, fenced grasslands. The tribe has installed new fences and cleared invasive cedar trees, Crosley said.

Of the other four plats in the reservation boundaries, all leased by non-Natives, one had a bonus bid of $5,750. The other three did not have bonus bids on the last lease renewal.

Some of those plots have more difficult terrain and aren't as accessible, Judge said. Those factors contribute to a piece of land's desirability.

The tribe hasn't set a cap on what it's willing to pay to keep leasing the two plots, Crosley said. Tribal leaders come to every auction, and so far they've decided to "push until they get it."

Changes to the board's leasing process, such as giving tribes first right of refusal, would likely need to be decided by the legislature, Sudbeck said, because the board has a fiduciary duty to make money for public schools. A right of first refusal would likely help the tribe and hurt the board's proceeds.

"I understand the (board) is doing what they're doing to try to make money," Crosley said. "That's their job, is to try to make as much money as they possibly can for the schools."

To own

The Santee Sioux tribe never owned its entire reservation, Runnels said.

The 1882 treaty was signed during the Allotment Era, when federal law dissected the land into pieces for individual Santee families and gave the remainder to non-Native homesteaders.

There's a second map framed in Runnels office, with no lines or text, just faded brown shapes marking the plots owned by those original families. The negative space stands out, blank sections in the center, along the bottom and spread like a checkerboard throughout, where the land was given away, primarily to white settlers.

By the 1930s, Runnels said, almost all of those Santee families had sold or traded their land away. The tribe was left with a couple thousand acres.

Stories have been passed down through generations of families using land to pay for groceries, Runnels said, or losing ownership when they couldn't pay taxes.

Similar situations lead to reservations in Nebraska shrinking and becoming checkered with non-Native ownership. Across the country, 90 million acres had been removed from Native ownership by the 1930s, the Indian Land Tenure Foundation estimates.

Like other tribes in the state, the Santee Sioux tribe has made a concentrated effort to start buying that land back. And like other tribes, they pay a higher than usual price.

In the 1960s, they were down to about 3,000 acres, Crosley said. Today, they own more than 20,000 acres, under a quarter of the reservation.

Recently, Crosley bought around 160 acres of land at $10,000 per acre, double the usual price of good cropland, because it adjoined the tribe's casino and golf course.

"It seems like when the tribe's involved, the price goes up. I don't know why, but people think we're wealthy because we have a casino. Really, we're not wealthy," Runnels said.

The tribe spent nearly $8 million to reclaim roughly 2,600 acres, Runnels said. He has a list of the tribe's 16 families that once lived on that land. When they bought it back, he looked at those names, and felt good knowing that they had reclaimed their relatives' land, even though it cost "extraordinary amounts."

It's been a goal of every administration, every tribal council over the years, to get their land back, Runnels said.

Part of the tribe's strategy now, Crosley said, is to buy the parcels of land surrounding the school land they're leasing, until it becomes landlocked by tribal land.

Some states have started to create policies to return state trust lands on reservations. North Dakota's Trust Lands Completion Act, which made it through committee in the U.S. Senate last year, would authorize the state to exchange lands and mineral rights within reservations for federal lands and minerals elsewhere.

Under Washington's Trust Land Transfer tool, the Department of Natural Resources, which manages its school trust land, is currently seeking funding from the Washington legislature to transfer land to four different tribal communities, also in exchange for lands elsewhere.

Crosley and Runnels would both like to see a similar land exchange for the Santee in Nebraska.

"Just having the jurisdiction over that land, for all the hunting and economics," Crosley said. "(The school land) would finish up some of the large blocks of land that we have, it would give us total ownership in some of those areas."

Between bonus payments and rent, Crosley said, those leases aren't cheap, and the tribe isn't able to gain any equity.

"If this was meant for school purposes for our people, based on everything that we have lost and given up in our history, then we shouldn't have to be paying for that school land," Runnels said.

This story was produced using data obtained through Grist's Misplaced Trust investigation.

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