Federal government bought back land for Swinomish

Records now open for public viewing on the U.S. Department of Interior’s website show that the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community obtained 243 acres of land that was allotted to individual tribal members generations ago.

Under the Land Buy Back Program for Tribal Nations, the federal government paid nearly $3.2 million for the land, which had 171 individual owners. The land now goes back into federal trust for the benefit of the entire tribe.

The Buy-Back Program allocated $1.9 billion in federal funding for tribes to consolidate land within reservations that had been fractionated in terms of ownership. The program targeted land that was still owned by the descendants of tribal members who had received land allotments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

On the Swinomish Reservation, like on many others in the United States, there are many parcels of land owned privately, or in “fee simple.” The islands of private land were allotted lands that were sold by their original tribal owners. While Swinomish has purchased fee simple land both on and off the reservation in recent years, those purchases were not part of the Buy-Back Program.

The program was specifically to allow tribes to consolidate land that had several owners with fractional interests in it. The allotted lands had been handed down in families across several generations and some parcels had a dozen or more owners.

Nobody was forced to sell, as the purpose was to purchase land at market prices from willing sellers. On Swinomish, 79 percent of the people with fractional land interests accepted the government’s offer to sell, according to Department of the Interior documents.

Per the feds, as of June 9, the government had committed $1.98 billion to buy a total of 2,115,897 acres of land with multiple owners on 41 reservations across the nation. Sale negotiations with some of the tribal landowners on five reservations, including Yakima Nation in our state, haven’t wrapped up yet.

Historically the allotment of land to individual tribal members was the result of acts by the U.S. Congress in early attempts to lift Native Americans out of poverty and encourage them to assimilate into United States culture.