The federal government is a trustee of my estate. They pretty much lost our whole estate on White Earth Reservation. The largest landholders on the reservation today are the federal, state and county governments. We haven't had success in getting them to return much land. They have returned 10,000 of the 250,000 acres which they have.
People do occasionally get success in court.
For instance, the 1999 Mille Lacs Supreme Court decision based on the 1837 treaty recognized our right to hunt and fish and harvest in the northern third of the state. We were founded around addressing the issue of structural poverty, which is what ensues when you do not have control over the land or any of your assets. In the late 1970s, the federal government came in as part of a national investigation into what had happened to the Indian estates and interests. They came to White Earth and found that this is one of the worst cases of land alienation in the country. Simply put, the White Earth records were messed up.