Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica 4/18/14 Native Americans on an oil-rich North Dakota reservation have been cheated out of more than copy billion by schemes to buy drilling rights for lowball prices, a flurry of recent lawsuits assert. And, the suits claim, the federal government facilitated the alleged swindle by failing in its legal obligation to ensure the tribes got a fair deal. This is a story as old as America itself, given a new twist by fracking and the boom that technology has sparked in North Dakota oil country. Since the late 1800s, the U.S. government has appropriated much of the original tribal lands associated with the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota for railroads and white homesteaders. A devastating blow was delivered when the Army Corps of Engineers dammed the Missouri River in 1953, flooding more than 150,000 acres at the heart of the remaining reservation. Members of the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara—were forced out of the fertile valley and up into the arid and barren surrounding hills, where they live now. But that last-resort land turns out to hold a wealth of oil, because it sits on the Bakken Shale, widely believed to be one of the worlds largest deposits of crude. Until recently, that oil was difficult to extract, but hydraulic fracturing, combined with the ability to drill a well sideways underground, can tap it. The result, according to several senior tribal members and lawsuits filed last November and early this year in federal and state courts, has been a land grab involving everyone from tribal leaders accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their people, to oil speculators, to a New York hedge fund, to the federal governments Bureau of Indian Affairs. The rush to get access to oil on tribal lands is part of the oil industrys larger push to secure drilling rights across the United States. Recent estimates show that the U.S. contains vast quantities of oil and gas. As fracking has opened new fields to drilling, and the U.S. has striven to get more of its energy from within its borders, leases from Louisiana to Pennsylvania have been gobbled up. Now the pressure is increasing on one of the last sizeable holdouts—lands owned by Native Americans. A review of tribal and federal records as well as lawsuit documents reveals a dizzying array of lowball, non-competitive deals brokered by numerous companies, often entwined with the tribal council and with individual landholders on the reservation. But at heart the alleged practices are simple: Tribal leaders and outsiders set up companies to buy drilling rights cheap and flip them later for spectacular profits—in one case earning as much as a 200-fold return in just four years. Hundreds of millions of dollars were lost, said Tex Hall, the current chairman of the Three Affiliated Tribes, in an interview. Its just a huge loss and well never get it back. At the center of that particular alleged scheme, according to one of the suits, was Spencer Wilkinson, Jr., longtime manager of 4 Bears Casino, a time-worn warehouse of slot machines, swirling cigarette smoke and stained carpets that serves as the reservations entertainment nexus and its financial hub. Wilkinson also sat on the board of the tribes development corporation, where he was charged with finding new opportunities to enhance the economy of the reservation. According to interviews with tribal members, former employees of the Three Affiliated Tribes, and a class action lawsuit filed in federal district court in Bismarck, ND against Wilkinson and others, Wilkinson used his access to casino funds—and to the development corporation—to gain influence and craft an oil deal that would leave him one of the richest men on the reservation. In 2006 he became an owner of a company, Dakota-3, with Richard Woodward, a white consultant who, records show, was receiving more than $20,000 a month from tribal funds for his work at the development corporation. Together, the suit and other legal filings allege, Wilkinson and Woodward planned to raise money and buy up rights to much of the remaining land not yet slated for drilling, all the while maintaining their work with the tribes and employing Wilkinsons relationship with the council to help get the oil leases approved. Pages Page 1 of 41234 Read more at indiancountrytodaymedianetwork/2014/04/18/land-grab-cheats-north-dakota-tribes-out-1-billion-suits-allege-154499
Posted on: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 19:12:59 +0000
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