Native Americans Buying Their Own Land Back with Casino Profits
May 28th, 2008Via: Star Tribune:
Face black with soot, Victoria Ranua strides across a Scott County 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, Ranua said, helps the native plants survive against invasive species.
“You know, Europeans didn’t just come here as people,” she said. “They brought their own plants and animals, and changed a lot of what was here.”
Ranua works for the casino-enriched Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community, which is recovering, acre by acre in the southwest metro, portions of the land its ancestors once lost to European settlers, and meticulously 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.
And they wonder if the tribe is engaged in a shrewd chess game to block 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 that ancestral land.
In Shakopee itself, said Mayor John Schmitt, “It appears they’re out to garner as much as they can get, wherever they can get it. And they have the war chest to do that.”
For his part, however, Stan Ellison, the tribe’s land manager, points to a pile of historic maps as a reminder of who, historically, interfered with whom.
“This land,” he said, “was taken by the point of a gun — and we are buying it back with American dollars.”
You think all those Casino and ciggarette
GREENBACKS went to Teepees and WigWams?
Out here in the Dakota’s they’ve nullified
all existing treaties and have ceased
to negotiate with the perps.
PRAISE BE UNTO THEM
Isn’t that an irony of fate! I say good for them, and hope they can do a better job of land management that ‘the white man” has done. Poetic justice.
John Doh Says “You think all those Casino and ciggarette GREENBACKS went to Teepees and WigWams?”
No. I thought they all went to liquor and new pick-up trucks to replace the ones they crashed driving back to the reservation on Saturday nights.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
The irony in this story runs silent and deep, a virtual Missisippi of the stuff, in every direction at once.
The North American Turf Wars of the 21st Century are just getting underway, and it will be quite entertaining to observe as the indigineous-versus-imperial struggles begin to blossom north of the imaginary line stretching from the Rio Grande across the Gadsden Purchase all the way to San Ysidro. Tijuana Norte indeed.
Meanwhile, the wise ones still hidden away among the largely emasculated and eradicated Native American populations are turning the game upside-down — using the system and the rules of the invader and the white man’s own squandered paper!
It doesn’t get any richer!
Sadly, it may be a Pyrrhic victory, as the system itself shakes in the wind.
Which of the “compromised” populations will be the first to journey to the holding facilities FEMA/KBR and the military have been so thoughtful to provide throughout the country?
I’m 25% Native American by birth, and this story brought a rare smile to my face. It’s about time!
This is the best news I’ve read in a very long time. There is, I believe, a force of justice working through our universe. Its not often that one gets to see the rare poetry of this force unwind.
This is beautiful.
Wonder what the Skull and Crossbones Society members’ conniptions look like as their master plan unwinds? Anybody there to hold down the Anglo Invader tongues as they convulse? Lets see, are they doing an old Indian chant to chase away the evil spirits?
I am laughing. What goes around, comes around. And in this case, it is good karma.