Travel Plaza-Dispute - SD county seeks injunction on travel plaza land

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) – South Dakota's Charles Mix County is seeking an injunction to prevent the federal government from taking a 39-acre travel plaza site near the Missouri River into trust on behalf of the Yankton Sioux Tribe.

The U.S. District Court lawsuit filed late last week is part of an ongoing dispute over the boundaries of the once-huge Yankton Sioux reservation in southeast South Dakota.

The state has argued that the reservation was disestablished in the late 1800s, but a federal appeals court last summer upheld a ruling that the reservation covers more than 30,000 acres held in trust.

The Yankton Sioux operate a gas station and convenience store on the tribal-owned travel plaza site, which is near its Fort Randall Casino and Hotel.

Charles Mix County in court documents has estimated that it receives about $6,200 in annual tax revenue from that land.

The county in its suit alleges that accepting the land into trust “deprives the State, the County and other political subdivisions of the authority to tax and authority to regulate the land and its uses.”

Charles Mix State's Attorney Pam Hein said the lawsuit was filed because the tribe did not give proper notice in its effort to acquire jurisdiction over the travel plaza site and other parcels in the county.

“What we are basically looking at is to make sure that each and every time we go through this that the proper procedures are followed,” Hein said Tuesday.

The Yankton Sioux Tribe in May 2002 passed a resolution seeking to acquire the travel plaza site and 26 other parcels.

In April 2009, the Interior Board of Indian Appeals affirmed the Bureau of Indian Affairs regional director's decision to accept the land into trust.

The board in its decision said the site was originally allotted to tribe member Anna Kutena Wahcahunka, who took the land out of trust in 1916 and sold it in 1919. The tribe bought the land from Charles J. and Alice M. Fuchs in 1992, but it remained under Charles Mix County's jurisdiction.

Hein said having adjacent sites under differing jurisdictions can create law enforcement issues.

A different parcel in the city of Wagner consists of 40 acres in the middle of town, creating a situation in which officers could arrest someone on one side of the street but not the other.

“In the heart of a city, you can imagine what kind of nightmares that can create,” she said.

The recent suit was filed against the U.S. Department of Interior, Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs Larry Echo Hawk, Bureau of Indian Affairs Regional Director Michael Black and Ben Kitto, superintendent of the bureau's Yankton Agency.

A call to the BIA's Great Plains Region in Aberdeen was referred to the agency's public relations office in Washington, and that call was not immediately returned.

In an 1858 treaty, the Yankton Sioux Tribe gave up 11 million acres in exchange for cash and a 430,000-acre reservation, which once encompassed about 60 percent of Charles Mix County.

A federal law passed in 1887 allowed each tribal member to get 160 acres, and more than 260,000 acres were allotted to individual members of the tribe. Most of that land has since been sold to non-Indians.

The federal government agreed in 1894 to pay the tribe $600,000 for 168,000 acres later opened to white settlers.

The dispute over the status of the reservation began in 1992 when a regional landfill was proposed for construction in Charles Mix County.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Piersol of Sioux Falls has ruled that at least a small part of the once-huge Yankton Sioux reservation continues to exist and remains under the legal jurisdiction of the federal and tribal governments.

A federal appeals court last summer upheld Piersol's ruling that the reservation covers more than 30,000 acres, which is mostly land the government holds in trust for the tribe and individual tribal members.