Celebrating with the Lac du Flambeau Tribe: An Unmanageable Situation
The Lac du Flambeau Land Management Department must work with multiple juriswdictions to manage tribal lands on a reservation that has a checkerboard of different loand ownerships
by Jonathan Gramling
One would think that land management on the Lac du Flambeau reservation would be a simple operation because the tribe controls the reservation. Well it’s not that simple.
“The Allotment Act and the Dawes Act were pretty devastating across Indian Country,” said Jessie Peterson who directs the tribe’s land management office. “I would say at least 23 percent of our land was lost through that. That land is across the reservation. We call it ‘checkerboard ownership.’”
And with “checkerboard ownership,” comes checkerboard authority.
““There is a lot of difficulty with the mixed jurisdictions,” Peterson said. “You have the tribe. You have the town. You have the county. It can get difficult with those jurisdictional issues.”
In an ideal world, the jurisdictions would collaborate in their decision making to ensure the best possible land use decisions. But this is the real world.
“Typically your non-members are not even consulting the tribe when they are doing development activities on the reservation,” Peterson said. “That becomes a huge issue. That development impacts tribal lands. We see that today. We are dealing with issues as we speak because of permits being issued to non-members without the tribe’s consent or coordination. The county should coordinate with us, but they don’t. The development can go from individual homes to resorts. We have people destroying shorelines for beautification and boathouses for that great north woods feel with no concern to what it is doing to our habitats, the spawning habitats, the land. We deal with that daily almost. It also has a huge impact on our wild rice as well.”
The multi-jurisdictional issues aren’t just limited to land management.
“We have our tribal roads department that maintains a good portion of our roads,” Peterson said. “But the county and the town also come in and do the county roads. Or if there is a road that is designated a town road, the town takes care of that. And it’s back to that mixed jurisdiction piece. We have a natural resource department that does a very good job of monitoring our wildlife habitat areas, maintaining them. We have a forestry department that takes care of our virgin forests and they do a very good job.
And so within this morass of jurisdictions, Peterson and her staff of three focus on what they can control while paying attention to what is going on overall on the reservation.”
“About 40 percent of the land is held in trust by the tribe,” Peterson said. “Our biggest goal is to preserve and conserve. However, we do have opportunity for tribal members to lease tribal lots and they build homes. A lot of it is residential development. The tribe has ultimate control over those lots. That’s our goal, to preserve and conserve for future generations.”
And they do it with limited resources.
“We are funded by the tribe itself,” Peterson said. “We have a very limited budget from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The tribe funds at least 90 percent of the land management program. My program hasn’t been hit by the budget cuts, but the tribe as a whole has been.”
Within the limited budget they have, the tribe is trying to buy back lands that were once part of the tribal trust.
“One of the other challenges is limited funds for land purchase,” Peterson said. “We do a lot of land buy-back. We buy lands within the reservation. But that funding is limited. If I could wave a magic wand, we would buy everything we could.”
The Lac du Flambeau reservation is a relatively small piece of what was once the lands under their control. The Franciscan Sisters have made U.S. History when they agreed to sell back their reservation land at its original cost.
“Our Lac du Flambeau Business Development Corp. handled the Franciscan land purchase,” Peterson said. “The land is within our stated territory. That’s absolute, the whole entire area was once ours. It would be safe to say that it was part of our land base at one point.”
And Peterson feels it is an honor to play her role in the tribe.
“I see a lot of stressful situations coming in,” Peterson said. “But I come in because I have to think about my kids, their kids, future generations. I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing it for them. We need to protect what we have, which isn’t very much. But we have to protect what we have. And I feel honored to play a part to have space in that mission. We have to take into account seven generations every day. I don’t know if that originated with us, but we all have that purpose and that vision to do our jobs with those seven generations in mind.”
With the cherished natural resource that is the Northwoods, one can only hope that everyone adopts the responsibility of looking at the impact on seven generations when making land use decisions. A little thought goes a long ways to solving big future problems. That’s the Lac du Flambeau way.
