(Bloomberg) -- The Osage Nation has placed more than 40,000 acres of ranchland in Oklahoma back in trust with the federal government, the second-biggest such transaction in US history and one that tribal leaders say will protect the land forever.
The deed was recorded Monday after a signing event at the Osage Casino in Pawhuska. It's a monumental transaction for the tribal nation, which saw the surface land of its almost 1.5-million-acre reservation chipped away in the decades after the 1906 Osage Allotment Act. Under that law, the US divided reservation land into individual parcels while keeping the oil and gas rights in trust on the Osage Nation's behalf. That system also opened the door to outsiders who systematically stripped Osage families of their land and mineral wealth, as documented in the Bloomberg and iHeartMedia podcast In Trust.
“We lost all that land, but now we’re able to turn that around,” Osage Nation Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear said at the event. “We just can’t stop here. We got to keep going.”
The Osage Nation purchased the ranch from billionaire Ted Turner for $74 million in 2016, after a high-stakes, closed bidding process that is featured in episode seven of In Trust.
But holding the title outright meant the possibility that the land could one day be sold off bit by bit, and lost again. Standing Bear and other Osage government leaders wanted to place the land in trust to prevent that from happening.
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Doing so is a complicated, bureaucratic process. Standing Bear said the Osage Nation’s application was stalled in part because of concerns by the US over environmental degradation from a century of oil production on the land—oil production the US oversaw as trustee of the Osage Nation’s mineral estate.
The land is now used to graze more than 2,000 cattle and a couple hundred bison, some of which are slaughtered and processed to be sold at the Osage Nation’s butcher house in Hominy. The Osage Nation is exploring the idea of hosting hunting and fishing events for its citizens on the property, according to Assistant Principal Chief RJ Walker.
Osage leaders say they knew this was likely the biggest tract of land that would come up for sale in their lifetime. Land prices have skyrocketed in Osage County, Walker said, but the Osage Nation will continue to look for opportunities to add to its position when it makes financial sense.
“It’s no secret that when land comes up for sale, the first or second call that’s made is to call the Osages,” said Walker, who drove the Osage Nation’s bid to Kansas almost a decade ago. “We sit in one little spot in this world, and it’s the Osage Nation—the Osage Reservation—and we’re taking it back little by little. In this case, it was a big bite.”
The Osage Nation was in the spotlight last year after the release of Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. The book-turned-movie depicted how Osage mineral rights, commonly called headrights, made some Osage citizens tremendously wealthy. But it also made them targets of horrific murders and other crimes in a period known as The Reign of Terror.
--With assistance from Allison Herrera.
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