"Nations Undivided, Indian Land Unearthed: The Dis-Owning of the United States Federal Indian Trust" by Kristin Tanner Ruppel

Kristin Tanner Ruppel

Deposited 2004

Abstract
The European invasion and colonization of the Americas created a variety of troubles for indigenous societies beyond the initial deadly shocks of conquest. In the United States, one of the most insidious of these was the evolution of ‘Indian Land’, the allotment of which forced indigenous people into modes of quasi-private land tenure and absurd (if any) inheritance schemes. Now, allotted Indian reservations are literally nations undivided: exterior boundaries remain intact but, on the whole, allotted lands are ‘fractionated’—co-owned by hundreds of individual Indian Landowners.

During the last century, fractionated allotments have been appropriated to the interests of some of the lowest bidders: usually non-Indian Land-users. Through the brokerage of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Land is rendered unavailable to Indian Landowners, except as a check in the mail. Under the (in both senses) practically unassailable assumption that value is only an economic measure, Indian Landowners find themselves fighting for control of their land and, tellingly, for the truth of their convictions. For many, the meager check in the mail means that “the land is still trying to take care of [them].” The consequences of fractionation are immeasurable—immense as well as non-quantifiable—when considered against the diversity of ethnoscapes whose single most unifying national symbol, hackneyed as it has become, is a “[p]assionate attachment to the land”.1

In this dissertation, Indian Land is revealed in its abiding strangeness in places like the Fort Hall Indian Reservation and Pocatello, Idaho. A series of landmark court cases from around the country expose Indian Land's hegemonic heart. The work of the landowner advocates illustrates how individual Indian Landowners get caught between tribal and federal interests, use, exchange and ‘sentimental’ values, nationhood and neighborhood, place and anti-place. Questions of difference and identity are embedded in local and national advocacy efforts as Indian Landowners from different reservations grapple with an evasive but virulent past.