CUJ News Tovey takes job with Land Tenure Foundation By the CUJ
PENDLETON – Dave Tovey, the former Executive Director for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, is working under contract with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation, a national, community-based organization serving American Indian nations and people in the recovery and control of their rightful homelands. Tovey left his job with the CTUIR in February 2017 and accepted the position with ILTF after considering and turning down several other offers that would have taken him out of town. “My family is here, my wife, everything I love. My prime objective was to find a way to work from Pendleton. You never know when the earth is going to get pulled from under your feet. But it warms my heart to realize that maybe I do have some skills and gratefully I have
a deep network across Indian Country.” As it turned out, Tovey’s work with ILTF President Cris Stainbrook over the years became a mutual opportunity. “Cris led the team for our project site at Umatilla back in 1988 with First Nations Financial Project working with us on land and the farm enterprise,” Tovey said. “Since then, ILTF was established, along with the Indian Land Working Dave Tovey Group, Indian Land Capital Company. The Tribal Farm Enterprise is now among the biggest wheat producers in Oregon and the Tribes’ land staff is the envy of other Tribes with our management of realty, probate, and land
acquisition.” Essentially, Tovey is working on a special project to make a case, building on work already done through the federal Land Buy-Back Program and years of work by ILTF, that administrative costs could be reduced for the number of allottees with fractionalized land title issues. The CTUIR spent some $13 million – its share of the Land-Buy Back money – to purchase land interests from willing sellers. Those land interests became part of Tribal holdings. On the other side of the coin, Tovey said, some 2.9 million fractionized tracts across the country remain in the ownerships of thousands of individuals. “We want to give people tools to better control management of their lands,” Tovey said. Toward that end, the core piece to leverage is will writing, a service still available through ILTF.
“If you don’t have a will the probate process goes through a number of heirs and the land keeps breaking up even further,” Tovey said. “Sometimes there are hundreds, even thousands of allottees. It gets harder and harder to get an agreement on what to do with the land.” Tovey said even with the Buy-Back program, fractionalized land continues to grow at 3 percent a year when allottees die. “Each one of those small interests take up administrative costs for the Department of Interior to manage the tract, send out notices and take on more land management responsibilities,” Tovey said. Tovey said he hopes his modeling and research will “eventually get traction” so a solid case can be built. “If the federal government can see future savings and find a way to pay up front, then they will see benefits in the long run,” Tovey said.
Wyden talks health care, VA benefits, budget cuts and climate change at CTUIR Town Hall By the CUJ
MISSION – Like he’s done hundreds of times, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden on June 10 spoke to a receptive audience at a town hall meeting in Oregon, but this time he did something different. He did it on an Indian reservation. Two days after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence he serves on probed former FBI Director James Comey about Russian interference in U.S. elections, Wyden was bouncing a basketball signed by players from the Nixyaawii Golden Eagles girls’ state championship basketball team at the Community Center gym on the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Members of the team presented Wyden with the basketball and, in return, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden he presented Nixyaawii dribbles the signed ball given Community School with to him by the Nixyaawii girls an American flag that had state champions. flown over the Capitol in CUJ photo/Wil Phinney Washington, D.C. Wyden had done his homework. He knew the girls had gone undefeated, 27-0, on their way to the Class 1A state championship. He knew how to pronounce Nixyaawii. And he knew that he was preaching to a choir of more than 200 people who likely heard the answers
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U. Senator Ron Wyden gestures to the crowd of mostly tribal members during his Town Hall meeting on the Umatilla Indian Reservation June 3. Sitting in the front row include, from left, Julie Taylor, Toni Cordell, Art McConville and Antone Minthorn.
they were expecting because Wyden didn’t get political. Only one pointed question was presented. It included terms like “outhouse” and “blowflies” and “stench” and Wyden deftly stepped clear of that potential mess. Instead he focused on the basics: health care, veterans services, climate change and budget cuts proposed by the administration of President Donald Trump – not necessarily in that order. Wyden, a member of the Senate Budget Committee, railed against Trump’s proposed budget, albeit noting that Presidents’ proposals always change. However, he told his audience, the proposal calls for cuts of $300 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, $150 million from Indian Health Services, $50 million from Indian Country housing, as well as other big whacks. “Budgets are not facts and figures on paper,” Wyden said. “They are the hopes and aspirations of real people.”
Confederated Umatilla Journal
Health care is near and dear to Wyden, who has long insisted it will take bipartisan coalitions to reach consensus on such human issues. As one might expect, he isn’t fond of any Republican desire to repeal the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. At the time of the Town Hall meeting, the GOP leaders hadn’t started meeting in secret to draft a health care plan they’d been unable to do for the eight years. (Since then, the Senate version of a health care bill has been released. It looks much like the House version that narrowly passed in the House.) However, with what he did know at the time, Wyden cautioned his older constituents, age 55-65, to expect insurance premium hikes perhaps five times as much as those of a young person. Further, Wyden said what he knew of the GOP plan would give states the ability to “punch holes” in obligations to cover pre-existing conditions by pricing individuals out of the market. Wyden on page 14
July 2017