A recent in-depth article in The Hill made it clear, Oklahoma Congressman Frank Lucas is not ready to surrender the USDA research station at Fort Reno into the hands of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes.
The August story, headlined “GOP lawmaker squares off with USDA, tribes over farm bill land transfer,” described it as a “decades-long battle over nearly 9,500 acres in Oklahoma” and that it was “coming to a head in Washington, D.C.”
If that’s so, it’s been coming for a long time. Even when Glenn English was the western Oklahoman in the U.S. House, the USDA experiment station was the focus of efforts to surrender it to the tribes.
The article focused on Rep. Lucas and how he used a farm bill provision to block transfer of the land “except as otherwise specifically authorized by law.”
According to The Hill, the move by Rep. Lucas also sets up a fight with the USDA and of course, leaders of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes who have attempted to reclaim their lands over the past 150 or more years. A representative of the USDA was quoted as describing the action by Rep. Lucas as a “move that defies decades of effort by Tribes and hundreds of years of tribal history.”
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