The Koi Nation, a small Native American tribe with fewer than 100 members, is moving closer to building a $600 million Las Vegas-style casino resort in California’s Sonoma County, just an hour north of San Francisco.

The Bureau of Indian Affairs has released its final environmental impact statement for the proposed Shiloh Resort and Casino, marking a key step in the tribe's application to place 27 hectares of land into federal trust.

The environmental report analyzed the project's potential impacts on air and water quality, wildlife, traffic, and other factors. While most effects were deemed "less than significant," some were classified as "potentially significant." The public now has 30 days to review the findings and submit comments before the bureau makes a final decision.

The Shiloh project faces stiff opposition from California lawmakers, Governor Gavin Newsom, and neighboring tribes. Newsom argued in an August letter to the Department of the Interior that the land in question lies outside the Koi Nation’s historical homeland — a key requirement under federal law for gaming approval.

Competing tribes, most notably the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, also oppose the project. They launched a high-profile media campaign earlier this month with full-page ads in major newspapers accusing the Interior Department of undermining tribal sovereignty.

Attorney Gabe Galanda, an enrolled member of the Round Valley Indian Tribes of California, says the proposed casino “is about tribes forsaking their teachings and falsifying history for profit. It’s a dangerous precedent for intertribal relationships.”

At the heart of the controversy is the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which sets the rules for tribal gaming and includes guidelines about a tribe’s historical connection to land. The casino must be located on land the federal government holds in trust for the tribe. The act also prohibited gaming on lands acquired after October 17, 1988, unless certain conditions are met.

One such exception applies to tribes with restored federal recognition. In December 2023, the Biden administration announced an updated final rule that made it easier for tribes to acquire land in trust. The rule now permits gaming on lands placed into trust as part of restoring territory to a landless tribe that has regained federal recognition.

To qualify for this exception, a tribe must demonstrate both a historical and contemporary connection to the land.

For the Koi Nation, the fight is deeply personal. In 1916, the federal government recognized the tribe under its former name, the Lower Lake Rancheria, and allocated 56 hectares of land in neighboring Lake County which were largely unfarmable. By 1918, most tribal members had relocated to Sonoma County.

In 1956, the federal government sold off 40 hectares of the Lake County land and transferred the remaining 16 hectares to the sole tribal member still residing there.

The Interior Department did not officially terminate the tribe; through clerical errors, it simply forgot about them. Decades later, the government reaffirmed that relationship.

“The Lower Lake Rancheria have been officially overlooked for many years by the Bureau of Indian Affairs even though their government-to-government relationship with the United States was never terminated,” then-assistant Indian affairs secretary Kevin Gover stated in his December 29, 2000 finding. “I am pleased to correct this egregious oversight.”

The Koi purchased the Shiloh land for $12.3 million in 2021 and applied to the government to place the land into trust. The tribe says that trails their ancestors used in trade pass directly through the site.

“The Koi Nation has been in this region for thousands of years and is fully within its rights to pursue this project,” said Sam Singer, a spokesperson for the tribe.

Singer attributes much of the opposition to fear of competition. Currently, more than 60 tribes operate 66 casinos across California. The Graton Rancheria operates a resort and casino about 17 kilometers south of the Shiloh property and is currently undergoing a $1 billion expansion.

In the days following the November 5 election, media outlets widely cited NBC exit polls indicating that 65% of Native American voters cast their ballots for Donald Trump.

While Native American advocacy groups acknowledge a trend of Native voters shifting toward the political right, they argued that the polling in this case was flawed and did not accurately represent their demographic.

NBC did not conduct the polling itself. It is one of four major news networks in the National Election Pool, or NEP, which relies on marketing research company Edison Research to question voters as they leave the polls.

Edison conducted phone, email and text message surveys of absentee and early voters in Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada and Ohio before Election Day and polled exiting voters at more than 300 polling stations across the U.S.

Once polling stations shut down on election night, Edison forwarded the voting data to NEP members so that they could analyze answers and project the winners.

NBC was the first to report exit polling data that included Native Americans. ABC News lumped Native Americans into the "all other races" category, as did CBS News and CNN.

The 65% figure prompted skepticism and confusion among some Native American observers. Native News Online, working with Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism and national survey firm Qualtrics, surveyed 865 Native voters and found that 51% of Native voters voted for Donald Trump.

In contrast, 60% of the nearly 5,000 Native Americans who participated in Illuminative's Indigenous Futures Survey in 2020 identified as liberal, and 51% said they were Democrats.

A closer look at the numbers

Stephanie Fryberg (Tulalip), who leads Northwestern University's Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity collaborative, was puzzled by the NBC calculation.

In a November 8 editorial in Native News Online, she said that the Native voter sample size was too small and couldn't accurately reflect Native voter preferences nationwide. She pointed out that 80% of respondents were from urban and suburban areas, while less than 20% came from rural areas.

In a separate editorial on November 18, Native News Online editor Levi Rickert questioned whether the respondents were legitimate members of federally recognized tribes.

“Perhaps the most challenging aspect of research and data collection among Native Americans is self-identification,” he wrote. “For various reasons, many people claim Native American ancestry. Among Native Americans, a common joke is that the largest 'tribe' in Indian Country is the 'Wannabe' tribe.”

VOA reached out to Fryberg to ask how she arrived at the numbers.

"We wanted to better understand the sample of Native voters that major news organizations were using to draw broad conclusions about voting patterns in the 2024 election," she answered by email. "Reports from the NEP show that only about 1% of these respondents identified as Native American, equating to roughly 229 individuals … underscoring the urgent need for more comprehensive and inclusive sampling strategies that genuinely reflect Native voices in electoral data."

Edison Research Executive Vice President Rob Farbman agreed that the sample size was small, but he told VOA that it met the NEP's minimum criteria for reporting subgroups.

"This is a national survey meant to represent the country, but subgroups as small as Native Americans … are difficult to measure," he said. "It's certainly possible that our survey is underrepresenting people that live on reservations."

He also noted that results at the county level are still coming in.

"And the votes that we've been seeing so far are showing that Trump is doing way better among American Indians than last time,” Farbman said.

Allison Neswood, a staff attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said that exit polls should be viewed "with a lot of skepticism," and that the Edison poll "should really be discarded."

"Real hard conclusions will take a little bit more time," she said. "We're going to have to get more granular data, below the county level, to the precinct level."

Land Back is a global, Indigenous-led movement advocating for the return of stolen lands.

While Indigenous communities have long engaged in that fight, “Land Back” as a meme began to gain popularity in 2019.

It now describes a decentralized international movement that emphasizes treaty rights, tribal sovereignty, climate justice and cultural revival.

“Land Back is like a prism with many facets to it,” said Alvin Warren, a former lieutenant governor of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who has spent decades advocating for the restoration and protection of Indigenous lands.

“For me, within the paradigm of the United States legal system and land tenure system, it absolutely means the restoration of full title to Indigenous people of a particular piece of land that is part of their original homeland.”

And it doesn’t stop with the transfer of legal title.

“It’s about reviving the land-based aspects of our ways of life,” he said. “It could be agriculture, it could be subsistence hunting, it could be gathering things. It is about reuniting, reconnecting us with our homeland, about undoing the many layers of separation and disconnection from our homelands that has been the goal of colonization in this country and in other parts of the world.”

Nick Tilsen, an Oglala Lakota from the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, gained national attention in July 2020 for blockading the road to Mount Rushmore ahead of a visit by then-President Donald Trump.

Shortly afterward, the NDN Collective activist launched a #LandBack campaign for “the reclamation of everything stolen from the original peoples.”

“When they [the federal government] took the land, they took everything from our people,” Tilsen said. “They took our governance structures. They took our culture. They took our language. They tried to destroy the familial structure of our people, our ability to make decisions over our food systems and our education systems.”

Tilsen believes the U.S. government should return all public lands, including the Black Hills, which the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty designated for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of Sioux Bands, today known as the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires).

That treaty was nullified without the tribe’s consent in the Indian Appropriations Bill of 1876 after a government and scientific expedition confirmed the presence of gold in the hills.

Is getting that land back a realistic goal?

James Swan, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe in South Dakota, doesn’t think so.

“It’s a pipe dream,” the founder of the grassroots Indigenous rights group United Urban Warrior Society, said. “But let’s say the U.S. government does return the Black Hills. Then what?”

Swan points out that tribes are not truly independent.

“They're part of the U.S. government,” he said. “A tribal chairman might be elected by the tribe, but he can't do anything without the tribal superintendent’s permission, and the superintendent works for the Bureau of Indian Affairs.”

Fragmented land ownership

In 1887, the government allotted some treaty lands to Native American heads of household. The remaining land, over 36 million hectares, was sold to settlers or granted to newly formed states to generate funds to support public institutions such as schools, jails or hospitals. States were allowed to sell off some of their trust land “for no less than ten dollars an acre.”

Grist and High Country News recently reported that states today hold more than 809,000 hectares of surface and subsurface land on Indian reservations.

Federal oversight

The U.S. government legally owns 21 million hectares of reservation land that it holds in trust for the benefit of tribes and their members.

Federal rules limit what tribes can do with that trust land — they can’t sell, lease or transfer it without Interior Department approval and must follow strict environmental rules for many projects.

Within that trust land are restricted-fee lands that are owned by individual Native Americans or tribes but cannot be sold or transferred without federal approval and are exempt from state or local land-use regulations.

There are also fee-simple lands within those reservations that are owned outright by individuals or tribes.

“The fee-simple owner is the absolute total owner,” said Robert Miller, a law professor at Arizona State University and an expert in federal Indian law. “You have all the rights of ownership. Leave it to whoever you want. Sell it to whoever you want for a dollar or a million dollars.”

Previously, tribes were advised to purchase reservation land under a fee-simple title.

“But the Supreme Court ruled in 1992 and 1998 that if a tribe holds land under [a] fee-simple title, the state can impose annual taxes on it,” Miller said. “This has led tribes to request that the Interior Department take their fee-simple land into trust to avoid state interference.”

Pathways to land back

In December 2012, the Interior Department launched the Land Buy-Back Program, which purchased and restored to tribal trust more than 1.2 million hectares of land in 15 states over 10 years.

“The Land Buy-Back Program’s progress puts the power back in the hands of tribal communities to determine how their lands are used — from conservation to economic development projects,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said ahead of the 2023 White House Tribal Nations Summit in Washington.

But some Native Americans are skeptical about the program.

“It is not about returning lost lands and putting them into trust for Tribes,” Todd Hall (Hidatsa) wrote in Buffalo’s Fire, an independent news platform run by the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance. “It is about dispossessing Individual Indians of their landownership rights and converting those rights to the collective ownership of the Tribal governments which were enacted by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.”

Today, tribes across the U.S. continue to buy fractional interests in trust or restricted land from willing sellers, often with help from conservancy groups and private landowners.

In September, the Western Rivers Conservancy transferred a 188-hectare former private cattle ranch to the Graton Rancheria in California for “permanent conservation and stewardship.”

Individuals also make private donations of land. In October 2018, Iowa citizen Rich Snyder voluntarily signed over land he owned in southern Colorado to the Ute Tribe.

In June, California announced it would return 1,133 hectares of ancestral land to the Shasta Indian Nation. Montana is currently considering the return of 11,800 hectares of trust land to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes on the Flathead Reservation in exchange for federal public lands outside of the reservation.

A University of Montana study in 2023 identified 44 laws placing federal public lands into tribal trust. Many, however, upheld existing rights such as access, grazing, mining or water use. Others stipulate that the land remain “forever wild” or be used only for “traditional purposes” such as hunting or holding ceremonies.

There are also legal routes to getting land back, especially with the U.S. Supreme Court establishing a key precedent in the landmark McGirt v. Oklahoma case, which reaffirmed that a large area of eastern Oklahoma still belongs to the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

“I predict there will be 30 to 50 years of litigation over every little issue if the state, feds and tribes don't cooperate,” Miller said.

Enbridge's contentious plan to reroute an aging pipeline around a northern Wisconsin tribal reservation moved closer to reality Thursday after the company won its first permits from state regulators.

Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources officials announced they have issued construction permits for the Line 5 reroute around the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa's reservation. The energy company still needs discharge permits from the DNR and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The project has generated fierce opposition. The tribe wants the pipeline off its land, but tribal members and environmentalists maintain rerouting construction will damage the region's watershed and perpetuate the use of fossil fuels.

Permits issued with conditions

The DNR issued the construction permits with more than 200 conditions attached. The company must complete the project by November 14, 2027, hire DNR-approved environmental monitors and allow DNR employees to access the site during reasonable hours.

The company also must notify the agency within 24 hours of any permit violations or hazardous material spills affecting wetlands or waterways; can't discharge any drilling mud into wetlands, waterways or sensitive areas; keep spill response equipment at workspace entry and exit points; and monitor for the introduction and spread in invasive plant species.

Enbridge officials issued a statement praising the approval, calling it a "major step" toward construction that will keep reliable energy flowing to Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region.

Bad River tribal officials warned in their own statement Thursday that the project calls for blasting, drilling and digging trenches that would devastate area wetlands and streams and endanger the tribe's wild rice beds. The tribe noted that investigations identified water quality violations and three aquifer breaches related to the Line 3 pipeline's construction in northern Minnesota.

"I'm angry that the DNR has signed off on a half-baked plan that spells disaster for our homeland and our way of life," Bad River Chairman Robert Blanchard said in the statement. "We will continue sounding the alarm to prevent yet another Enbridge pipeline from endangering our watershed."

Tribe sues in 2019

Line 5 transports up to 23 million gallons (about 87 million liters) of oil and natural gas daily from Superior, Wisconsin, through Michigan to Sarnia, Ontario. About 19 kilometers (12 miles) of the pipeline run across the Bad River reservation.

The tribe sued Enbridge in 2019 to force the company to remove the pipeline from the reservation, arguing that the 71-year-old line is prone to a catastrophic spill and that land easements allowing Enbridge to operate on the reservation expired in 2013.

Enbridge has proposed a 66-kilometer (41-mile) reroute around the reservation's southern border.

The company has only about two years to complete the project. U.S. District Judge William Conley last year ordered Enbridge to shut down the portion of pipeline crossing the reservation within three years and pay the tribe more than $5 million for trespassing. An Enbridge appeal is pending in a federal appellate court in Chicago.

Michigan's Democratic attorney general, Dana Nessel, filed a lawsuit in 2019 seeking to shut down twin portions of Line 5 that run beneath the Straits of Mackinac, the narrow waterways that connect Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. Nessel argued that anchor strikes could rupture the line, resulting in a devastating spill. That lawsuit is still pending in a federal appellate court.

Michigan regulators in December approved the company's $500 million plan to encase the portion of the pipeline beneath the straits in a tunnel to mitigate risk. The plan is awaiting approval from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.