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problems, lawsuits, flooding and complaints about its wastewater. The $109 million plant will process 1,500 cattle per day from the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota.
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Excerpts from recent South Dakota editorials
The Associated Press
• Rapid City Journal, Rapid City. Dec. 28, 2012
• Let tribes manage own lands
• Just in time for Christmas -- and Christmas bills -- Native Americans began receiving payments of up to $1,000 as part of the landmark Cobell settlement for tribal trust lands. In addition, tribes will soon receive more than $430 million to buy back tribal land with "fractured ownership."
• The payments from the settlement are compensation from tribal lands held in trust by the federal government, which mismanaged the accounts. The settlement will pay out $1.5 billion to 350,000 individual beneficiaries and $1.9 billion to purchase trust land and create a college scholarship fund for Native Americans.
• Pine Ridge reservation stands to gain the most from the buy-back program. The reservation has almost 1.2 million acres of trust land allotments with multiple owners. About $126 million will be available to buy individual interests in those tracts, which will be consolidated and ownership transferred to the tribe.
• By consolidating the fractured trust lands, the tribes will be able to approve leases on the land or develop it with housing, other infrastructure or economic development projects. Too often, fractured land ownership has stymied economic development on reservations, many of which are among the poorest areas in the nation.
• The Cobell settlement is named for the originator of the class action lawsuit, Elouise Cobell, a member of the Blackfeet tribe and who died last year before the settlement was disbursed.
• The federal government has a history of mismanaging Native American interests, including the trust lands that the Bureau of Indian Affairs was supposed to manage to benefit tribes and individual land owners.
• Consolidating the fractured trust lands and giving ownership to the tribes is an important step toward self-determination and, hopefully, some measure of economic independence. Let the tribes manage their own lands that the federal government did such a poor job of doing on the tribes' behalf.
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