Andrea Joy Campbell: “on September 15, 1999, I introduced S. 1586, the Indian Land Consolidation Act Amendments of 2000. At that time I…”

“on September 15, 1999, I introduced S. 1586, the Indian Land Consolidation Act Amendments of 2000. At that time I pledged to work with all interested parties to address the vexing problems associated with fractionated ownership of Indian lands. These lands were carved out of Indian reservations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Within only a few generations, the ownership of the allotments was divided among dozens of the heirs of the original owners of these parcels. This situation has only grown worse as each decade passes. In 1983, Congress tried to solve fractionation when it enacted the Indian Land Consolidation Act (ILCA), P.L. 94-459. The ILCA prevented small undivided interests from passing by either devise or descent. Only those interests that produced more than $100 in revenue in the preceding year were exempted. In 1987 the Supreme Court ruled in Hodel v. Irving, 481 U.S. 704, that those provisions of the ILCA violated the 5th Amendment by taking property without just compensation. Then in 1992, the General Accounting Office surveyed 12 Indian reservations with fractionated ownership and reported to Congress: BIA's workload for ownership records is substantial. The agency maintains about 1.1 million records for the 12 reservations. Over 60 percent of the records represent small ownership interests of Indian individuals--some as small as one four thousandth of 1 percent.…”