In September, the company wrote to the BIA of its plans to hold a luncheon with certain landowners whose consent it needed, including Mary Tom. Western Refining told the BIA it would like “as much as possible” to limit the luncheon to just the few family members whose signatures it was seeking, “and not other interest owners in the allotment or outsiders to that process.” Documents In These Times obtained via a FOIA request also show emails among the BIA staffers to plan a “pre-meeting” with the company.

When asked about these communications, Nedra Darling, a spokesperson for the BIA, told In These Times that the BIA did not coordinate with the oil company ahead of the luncheon, or help prevent family members from attending it.

At the meeting, Tom asked for her older brother and her nephew Patrick. Roberta Tovar phoned Patrick, who lives several hours from Gallup, and told him what was going on. Patrick immediately asked Tovar to hand the phone to a BIA official. No one would listen to him, he says.

An oil company representative later described Adakai as “attempting to disrupt the meeting by phone.” Tovar claims a Western Refining employee escorted her and her father out of the meeting. The company put it more blandly in a report to the BIA about the event: “Roberta Tovar and Charles Irving left after lunch.”

A group of family members, including the Adakais, later​ e-mailed Sharon Pinto, director of the BIA office for the Navajo region. They asked why some landowners had not been invited to the gathering and complained that the company was employing “bribes” to get consents. “We are concerned BIA officials and selected landowners are being wined and dined by Western Refining to persuade a signing of the …lease despite our repeated requests for re-review and evaluation,” they wrote. They asked for a sign-in sheet from the meeting. Pinto replied that the meeting “was called by Western Refining” and the agency did not get a copy of the sign-in sheet.

Were landowners exhorted into signing? Darling says no. She claims the BIA was present on landowners’ behalf, “providing technical guidance” and reassuring them in the Navajo language. “At no time did BIA pressure anyone to sign or not sign,” Darling said.

Tovar is adamant—her aunt was pressured. “That’s why I said they were like coyotes on a sheep,” she says.

The landowners who had filed the lawsuit continued to reach out to the company to attempt to negotiate a better deal. But when they requested a copy of Western Refining’s appraisal of the land, the BIA office instructed the group to submit a FOIA request, despite the Interior Department court having ordered the office in 2013 to “provide the landowners with an appraisal of the right of way to assist them in negotiations.”

The BIA’s Darling claims that Native landowners need not use FOIAs to obtain their own “trust data or information.” But landowners In These Times spoke to, BIA documents and IBIA court decisions reveal that the Freedom of Information Act must often be used to obtain needed documents.

Complicating matters further, since 2014 Western Refining has brought two federal lawsuits seeking to resolve the situation. One seeks to condemn the family’s land, a technique normally used by governments to gain access to land needed for the public good. The other sues the Interior Department, seeking to reverse the IBIA’s unfavorable rulings. Citing the pending litigation, the company’s press representative, Gary Hanson, declined to comment for this article.

Shifting into reverse

Terry Beckwith says that what Native landowners want is simple: “We want to protect ourselves and our land, and maximize the money we can make on it.” He notes basic problems that need fixing—for example, some of the most cursory BIA forms date to the 1940s and 1950s and are still used today. He says they should be updated and expanded to include the purpose and time span of the agreement, remedies in case of damage to the land, such as an oil spill, and other necessary items.

One solution is to return control of land and resources to tribes, reversing some of the worst effects of allotment, including fractionation. The federal government, which once wanted to “pulverize” tribes, has in recent decades flipped the script, instituting regulations to give tribes more say in their own leasing deals (this does not affect individuals’ agreements, which are still fully subject to the BIA bureaucracy). Meanwhile, buyback programs, including the 2010 Cobell settlement, have helped tribes rebuild their land bases by funding the purchase of tribal members’ allotments. By 2015, tribes had regained and placed in trust 1.5 million acres via Cobell, according to the Interior Department.

Some tribes are reconstituting their homelands their own way—and taking control of their own economic development. In South Dakota, the Rosebud Sioux Tribe operates the Tribal Land Enterprise (TLE), a land buyback program that long predates that set up by Cobell. Since its establishment in 1943, TLE has acquired about a million acres.

TLE’s strategic purchases have facilitated the development of projects that make sense to tribal members, and that’s been a big part of the program’s success, according to tribal member and TLE director Ann Wilson-Frederick. These include a grocery store on a reservation where there are few, 600 units of badly needed housing and a wind farm. With more land available to Rosebud’s ranchers and farmers, they can increase production. The tribe can also put business and environmental regulations in place and choose to set aside land for spiritual and ecological reasons, adds Rosebud tribal member Wizipan Little Elk, CEO of the tribe’s economic development corporation and a former Interior Department official.

All of this is done with an eye on the future, says Little Elk. “We like to say we have a one-thousand-year plan.”

In the shorter term, Patrick Adakai and his relatives continue to fight Western Refining in court. He says his relatives’ goal is not just a better deal for themselves but improving how leasing is handled, including better BIA record-keeping and more landowner control of the valuation process. “We are doing this for our Indian people, so they can improve their lives. This is for the children and grandchildren.”

This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Leonard C. Goodman Institute for Investigative Reporting.