A few years ago, 2010 or thereabouts, Warren Buffet bought himself a train set to play with. Being Buffet, the train set is known to the rest of us as the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway. BNSF for short. I dunno, maybe he liked the orange and chocolate paint scheme? Well, Congress established what we now call the Swinomish Reservation on Puget Sound in the middle of the 19th century and placed the few Salish survivors of smallpox and white depravity on that reservation. The subsequent miserable history of government abuse is too long and depressing to summarize here but in 1885 a railroad company shoved its tracks across the reservation to get to a lovely piece of real estate called Fidalgo Island. After all, who was going to stop them? (Note to Spanish scholars...the same word today is "Hidalgo", meaning gentleman in the aristocratic authority sense. My sources tell me that there was a shift from the f to a silent h some time after the island was given its European name. This shift didn't happen everywhere and in Ladino you still find the f.) Back to our story. This railroad serves major oil refineries which are where they are, North of Puget Sound proper, because the State doesn't want supertankers on Puget Sound itself. The tribe doesn't like oil trains running around in its largely environmentally sensitive tide lands and marshes. At some point, though, BNSF and the tribe agreed to permit one 25 car train each way daily to pass. Come to find out...BNSF has increased traffic to 100 car trains without saying anything to the Tribal Council! Buffet's train set owes the Tribe $400 million for trespass according to the US District Court! More to come, too, since BNSF may be required to disgorge its profits from that trespass. It will be interesting to see what the Appeals Court will say.
Shasta Indian Nation to get homeland back in the largest land return in California history. https://www.yahoo.com/news/shasta-indian-nation-homeland-back-232438066.html "Gov. leaving the page." data-wf-tooltip-position="bottom" data-wf-reset-every="90">Gavin Newsom has set in motion the largest land return in California history, declaring his support for the return of ancestral lands to the Shasta Indian Nation that were seized a century ago and submerged. Returning the ancestral land to Shasta Indian Nation was also supported by Siskiyou County last year. In November, the county Board of Supervisors unanimously voted to send a letter of support to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Fish and Wildlife, along with the California Natural Resources Agency, will work with the Shasta Indian Nation on the legal return of the lands. Shasta's ancestors inhabited the lands around Copco Lake near Bogus Mountain before there were formal records of the area, according to Siskiyou County Board of Supervisors meeting documents. Traditionally, the land was known as Kíkacéki."