By Destiny Herbers
Aaron LaPointe sits behind a desk in the Little Priest Tribal College’s library basement, ready to speak to a class in a new program he helped develop – diversified agriculture.
He’s here, on this 100-degree August day, to show these high school and college students – the future of the Winnebago Tribe, he believes – how Ho-Chunk Farms, the tribe’s farming company, is changing the face of agriculture on their reservation.
“When you asked a student at my high school what a farmer looks like they would tell you a white guy with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat on,” said LaPointe, senior director of business operations for Ho-Chunk, Inc. “They didn't see themselves as farmers, they just thought that's what the white guys do. And we just let them use our land to do that.”
That perception is rooted in a century of reality. The tribe only owns roughly 27,000 acres of its 120,000-acre reservation, after U.S. government actions that directly or indirectly led its farmland to pass into non-Native hands — mostly white farmers.
But that reality is starting to change. In the past five years, three Nebraska tribes – the Winnebago, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska – have bought an estimated 3,000 acres, total, of farmland that was once theirs.
Despite the tribes’ recent financial successes — or perhaps, in part, because of them — the process has been neither cheap nor easy. Tribal leaders say white landowners who know that buying back land is a priority believe the tribes can and will pay any price.
All three tribes are paying prices that are higher than normal, according to a Flatwater Free Press analysis of data gathered by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln journalism class.
The Winnebago Tribe spent nearly $10,000 per acre, on average, to buy back 340 acres of ag land. That’s about $3,000 higher than the northeast region’s 2022 average.
Ho-Chunk leaders like LaPointe think the higher prices and headaches are worth it. (Editor’s note: Ho-Chunk Inc. is a Flatwater Free Press sponsor.)
“We want to start farming our own reservation. We want to own our reservation again,” LaPointe said.
Reservation, not reserved
Just after the Civil War, the United States government attempted to completely upend the way most Native American tribes lived – including the way they viewed land.
The General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly known as the Dawes Act, tried to force assimilation by splitting the previously communally owned reservation into 160-acre pieces of farmland, individually owned by tribal members.
The government then sold the leftover land to non-Native settlers.
“At one point we owned 100% of our reservation, until the federal government thought ‘Oh, this guy's got maybe too much land, let's take some of that from them,’” LaPointe said.
Native Americans had no concept of land as property, said Ted Hibbeler, member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and Tribal Extension Educator at UNL. Tribes identified with territories through their creation stories, and built relationships with that land over thousands of years, but they did not view land as a form of money or power.
More reservation land was lost when tribal members grew financially desperate.
One example: After the land allotment, members of the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska shopped for necessities in White Cloud, Kansas. When they couldn't afford groceries at one store, the grocer convinced them to sign over land as a promise to repay.
“They needed food, and that’s just what they had to do,” said Tony Fee, secretary of the Iowa Tribe. “This individual got them to sign it over as collateral … and they never could afford to get it back. So they lost it.”
Today, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska owns about half of its 12,000-acre reservation, with Native and non-Native land ownership checkerboarded throughout.
On the Winnebago reservation, many families lost their land back paying unfamiliar taxes, or sold the land to cover medical bills, LaPointe said.
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