Utah senator blocks vote on Montana tribe's recognition

Staff and wire report

A Republican U.S. senator from Utah last week blocked a vote on a bill to grant federal recognition to Montana’s Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

The U.S. House passed a bill in September that would have required the federal government to set aside a small amount of land for the tribe and make its 6,000 members eligible for government benefits.

Sen. Mike Lee objected Thursday to passing the bill without debate, arguing the Bureau of Indian Affairs denied the tribe’s petition for recognition in 2009.

Little Shell Tribal Chairman Gerald Gray called it a “disheartening outcome.”

If the bill does not pass the Senate by the end of the year, it will have to be re-introduced in the next Congress.

All three members of Montana’s congressional delegation support the bill.

The state of Montana recognized the tribe in 2000, but the tribe’s efforts have languished in Washington.

U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., slammed Lee’s blockade.

  “The Little Shell have fought for generations to secure what is rightfully theirs,” Tester said in a release Thursday.  “Now just one man stands in the way and it is time for him and his political party to quit the political shenanigans and allow this long-overdue vote to take place.”

In 2007, the first bill Tester introduced after he was elected to the Senate was to federally recognize the Little Shell Tribe.

This year, Tester passed his bipartisan bill to grant the Little Shell federal recognition out of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee in May.

Also this year, a bill sponsored by Rep. Greg Gianforte, R-Mont., was the first Little Shell recognition bill to pass out of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Native American tribes must be formally recognized as sovereign nations by the federal government to exercise full self-governance, Tester’s release said. Under this nation-to-nation relationship, tribes access economic development, health care and education resources, and regulate affairs on tribal lands.

Tribes can be recognized by the federal government through congressional legislation, a U.S. court decision or an administrative process through the U.S. Interior Department.

The Little Shell, a tribe with 4,500 or more members concentrated in the Great Falls area but spread throughout central and northern Montana and across the nation, have been formally trying to gain federal recognition since at least the 1930s.

Montana’s members of Congress have repeatedly sponsored bills to have Congress recognize the tribe.

The tribe has been without a recognized homeland since the late 1800s, when Chief Little Shell and his followers in North Dakota broke off treaty negotiations with the U.S. government. Tribe members later settled in Montana and southern Canada.

Tribal historians trace the tribe’s other attempts to gain recognition back to the 1860s, when the Pembina Band of Chippewa signed a treaty with the U.S. government.

In 1978, the Little Shell petitioned the Bureau of Indian Affairs for recognition through the Bureau‘s Federal Acknowledgement Process. Despite a favorable report by the Department of the Interior in 2000 and recognition of the tribe by the Montana government that same year, the Bureau of Indian Affairs denied the tribe recognition in 2009 and again in 2013.