American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION Interracial tensions have run high for more than a decade on the checkerboarded White Earth Indian Reservation of northern Minnesota. While institutional racism and mutual suspicion have long marked relations between the Anishinaabeg and their Anglo neighbors, current levels have reached unprecedented heights. The impetus lies, predictably enough, in conflicting claims to reservation lands-claims that were brought to community attention through the documentation of some thirteen hundred validated land title claims in the Minnesota Chippewa tribe's (MCT) "Section 2415 Land Research Project.'' (See fig. 1.) The project was initiated in 1978, under a Bureau of Indian Affairs contract, for the purpose of investigating land tenure status on the MCT's six member reservations. Project researchers anticipated that their findings would reveal parcels of Indian lands upon which non-Indians had engaged in long-term trespass for agricultural, right of-way, forestry, or mining purpose. Indeed a significant number of illegal land use practices were documented. The investigation also uncovered a multitude of illegal and unauthorized title conveyances dating as far back as the 1905 allotment of treaty lands and as recently as the 1960s.