DC Circuit denies Ute Tribe ownership over millions of acres in Utah

The ruling is the latest defeat for the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation to restore a large portion of the Uncompahgre Reservation in northeastern Utah.WASHINGTON (CN) — A D.C. Circuit panel on Friday rejected an effort by the Ute Indian Tribe of the Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation to regain ownership over 1.5 million acres of land in northeastern Utah.The three-judge appeals panel ruled the disputed land in the Uncompahgre Reservation is ineligible for restoration under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, upholding a decision by the Department of Interior and a federal judge that the tribe is not entitled to any proceeds if the land was sold.U.S. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, a Donald Trump appointee, wrote the court’s opinion and focused on the 1880 Act, which ratified a settlement in which three Ute bands, including the Uncompahgre, agreed to sell the portion of their reservation in Colorado to the United States in exchange for moving to their current location in Utah.“Section 3 of the 1880 Act gives the Tribe compensable title to some lands, in directing that the proceeds from certain lands sales be deposited into the Treasury for the benefit of Indians,” Katsas wrote. “The question is whether those lands fall within the Colorado Reservation or the Uncompahgre Reservation in Utah. Text, structure and historical context all point towards compensable title limited to the Colorado Reservation.”Katsas pointed to two clauses in Section 3 that specifically cover the unallotted lands “released and conveyed to the United States,” none of which were in Utah. The Supreme Court ruled the same in 1971, stating that only the lands given to the tribe in an 1868 treaty belonged to them.According to the tribe, the bands of the Ute Tribe had lived in the Rocky Mountains, with their homeland ranging between Denver and Salt Lake City, since time immemorial.The 1880 Act followed decades of hostility between the Ute bands and the federal government — where the initial 1863 treaty created a 15.7 million-acre reservation in Colorado that was shrunk in 1874 after valuable mineral deposits were found — which reached its zenith in 1879 when federal agents were killed in an incident known as the Meeker Massacre.In retaliation, Congress took steps to dispossess the Utes of their reservation and remove them from Colorado.In 1882, President Chester Arthur issued an executive order to set aside 1.9 million acres for the Uncompahgre Reservation. Of the total acreage, the government allotted about 12,500 acres to the tribe and sold off some 400,000 acres of unalloyed land, with the remaining 1.5 million acres administered by the government.The tribe described the 1880 Act as forcing the bands into a new agreement, requiring they give up 3.7 million more acres in exchange for a smaller reservation for the Uncompahgre Band in Colorado, if possible, or in Utah.The case stems from the Ute Tribe’s challenge of a 2018 decision by then-Interior Department Deputy Secretary David Bernhardt denying the tribe’s request to restore the 1.5 million acres in the Uncompahgre Reservation, which had been held as public domain land under the Indian Reorganization Act.Bernhardt based his decision on a legal opinion from the Office of the Solicitor that found the restoration of lands could only occur if the tribe is entitled to proceeds from any sale of the lands.He concluded that the public domain lands were not eligible because the federal government could use the land for its own purposes without any need to compensate the tribe.The tribe then challenged the decision in the federal court, but U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Donald Trump appointee, ultimately granted summary judgment in the government’s favor finding the tribe “has no compensable title to the government-managed land in the Uncompahgre Reservation.”Katsas similarly rejected the tribe’s argument that the 1880 Act entitled it to a “replacement reservation.”He said the act did the opposite by providing individual allotments to tribal members which the Supreme Court described as “the termination of tribal ownership in the reservation lands, and the limitation of Indian ownership to such lands as might be allotted in severalty to individual Indians.”Further, the tribe’s assertion that ambiguous statutes or treaties must be construed in favor of tribes or how tribes would have understood them at the time fails, Katsas wrote, because the relevant law is unambiguous.“In *Confederated Bands of Ute Indians,*the [Supreme] Court held that the 1880 Act foreclosed a claim that various Ute bands had an ownership interest in another reservation later created by executive order,” Katsas wrote. “The court summed up: ‘We cannot, under any acceptable rule of interpretation, hold that the Indians owned the lands merely because they thought so.’ So too here.”Katsas was joined by Chief U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan and Senior U.S. Circuit judge Judith Rogers, a Barack Obama appointee and Bill Clinton appointee, respectively.The tribe did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Subscribe to our free newslettersOur weekly newsletter Closing Arguments offers the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world, while the monthly Under the Lights dishes the legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.Additional Reads