Indian land ownership

New Empirical Study on Indian Land Fractionation on 12 Reservations

Matthew L.M. Fletcher1 Comment

Jacob W. Russ & Thomas Stratmann have posted “Creeping Normalcy: Fractionation of Indian Land Ownership” on SSRN.

Here is the abstract:

In 1992 the General Accounting Office (GAO) published a quantitative survey of Indian land ownership of twelve reservations, which was the first and still is the only survey of Indian land ownership. In our study we use 2010 data to show how ownership fractionation for these reservations has changed since the original GAO study. We find that, despite the whole of Congressional action regarding land fractionation, and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs’ (BIA’s) land consolidation programs, fractionation has not only continued, but BIA’s complex recordkeeping workload has nearly doubled for the twelve reservations over the eighteen year interval. The GAO estimated that BIA’s annual recordkeeping costs for these twelve reservations was between $40 and $50 million. With the addition of over a million new ownership records, due to fractionation, we estimate yearly recordkeeping costs have increased to $246 million in 2010.

New Scholarship on Long-Term Leasing Act of 1955

Matthew L.M. Fletcher

Dustin Frye has posted “Law, and Land Tenure: Understanding the Impact of the Long-Term Leasing Act of 1955 on Indian Land Holdings” on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

An increasing focus of contemporary Native American economic development literature concentrates on the role of institutions. Land tenure arrangements are an important part of the institutional structure on reservations because several reservations rely on agriculture and resource extraction. The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by a series of policy interventions targeting Native Americans. One such policy, the Long-Term Leasing Act (LTLA) of 1955, reduced bureaucratic oversight and altered the composition of Native American trust land. The policy extended the possible term of leases on trust lands, increasing economic opportunities, lowering transaction costs, and increasing the discounted present value of retaining land in trust status. Using a new panel dataset on land tenure, this paper finds that the LTLA significantly diminished the flow of land to fee-simple (private ownership) and tribally owned land held in trust, leading to a higher rate of retention in individually owned land held in government trust. I extend the empirical framework to determine whether reservations under state jurisdiction experienced additional changes in land tenure due to the ability to more credibly commit to leasing contracts or whether legal uncertainty over land-use and expanded credit access led to increased transfer to fee-simple. The results suggest that reservations under state jurisdiction continued transferring land to fee-simple, which supports the legal land-use uncertainty and suggests the expanded credit access impacted purchasing more than leasing. To examine the degree that heirship is influencing the results, I estimate the model by allotment date groups, where allotment dates proxy for heirship. Results indicate that reservations allotted earlier, which have more fractionated ownership, responded more to the Long-Term Leasing Act. Shifts in land holdings induced by the LTLA reinforce the importance of reducing transaction costs associated with trust land for Native American economic development.