Native American reservations cover just 2 percent of the United States,
but they may contain about a fifth of the nation’s oil and gas, along
with vast coal reserves. Now, a group of advisors to President Donald
Trump on Native American issues wants to free those resources from what
they call a suffocating federal bureaucracy that holds title to 56
million acres of tribal lands, two chairmen of the coalition told
Reuters in exclusive interviews. The group proposes to put those lands
into private ownership -- a politically explosive idea that could upend
more than century of policy designed to preserve Indian tribes on
U.S.-owned reservations, which are governed by tribal leaders as
sovereign nations. The tribes have rights to use the land, but they do
not own it. They can drill it and reap the profits, but only under
regulations that are far more burdensome than those applied to private
property.
