Front page of yesterday’s StarTribune: Reclaiming a lost legacy – The Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community is purchasing land in Scott County at a pace that’s worrying Shakopee city leaders.
… the tribe’s land purchases, which are surging as the price of land sags, are turning up a different sort of heat in Scott County. Civic leaders in Shakopee say the pace and pattern of the tribe’s land buys — it has spent more than $100 million — are making planning a logistical nightmare in the fast-growing community.
And they wonder if the tribe is engaged in a shrewd chess game to block Shakopee’s development plans, then move out into open countryside to start reacquiring vast stretches of ancestral land.
…
"This land was taken by the point of a gun — and we are buying it back with American dollars." – Stan Ellison, Manager of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community (SMSC) Land and Natural Resources Department.
