North Dakota tribe fighting state over rights to minerals

FARGO, N.D. — For nearly two centuries, the federal government has repeatedly assured a Native American tribe in North Dakota that it has rights to a reservation river and the issue has stayed relatively quiet until oil companies figured out a way to drill under the waterway, which is now a man-made lake.

With an estimated $100 million in oil royalties waiting in escrow to be claimed and future payments certain to come, the state has become more involved in seeking ownership rights. It successfully lobbied the U.S. Interior Department to suspend a last-minute Obama-era memo stating that mineral rights under the original Missouri River bed should belong to the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, which is also known as the Three Affiliated Tribes.

The Interior Department put the minerals issue on hold last summer and ordered a review of the “underlying historical record.” The state maintains that it assumed ownership of the riverbed when North Dakota became a state in 1889, citing a constitutional principle known as the equal footing doctrine.

The state’s immersion in the issue isn’t sitting well with tribal members, who say it’s between them and the Trump administration.

“They obviously didn’t care that much before,” the tribal chairman, Mark Fox, recently told The Associated Press. “Now that there might be $100 million there, all of a sudden the state really cares, right?”

The January 2017 memo by former Interior Department Solicitor Hilary Tompkins, an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, is one of numerous federal declarations since the 1820s that have confirmed the tribes’ ownership of the river, which was altered when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the Garrison Dam in the 1950s.

Tribal officials have recently taken to social media and penned op-eds asking state leaders to come out in support of the tribes’ ownership rights, much like they did during the last legislative session regarding an oil and tax agreement with the tribes.

“I hope our elected officials will join us once again in supporting our lawful property rights to the minerals under the Missouri River on the Fort Berthold Reservation,” Fox wrote in an op-ed kicking off the campaign.