These Nebraska Tribes Are Buying Back Farmland and Attempting to Reverse History

Land ownership on the Winnebago Reservation had gone in only one direction—away from Native tribes and farmers. Until recently, when several tribes decided to change that.

Aaron LaPointe sits behind a desk in the Little Priest Tribal College’s library basement in Winnebago, Nebraska, ready to speak to a class in a new program he helped develop: diversified agriculture.

He’s here, on this 100-degree August day, to show high school and college students—the future of the Winnebago Tribe—how Ho-Chunk Farms, the tribe’s farming company, is changing the face of agriculture on their reservation.

“When you asked a student at my high school what a farmer looks like they would tell you a white guy with cowboy boots and a cowboy hat on,” said LaPointe, senior director of business operations for Ho-Chunk, Inc. “They didn’t see themselves as farmers, they just thought that’s what the white guys do. And we just let them use our land to do that.”

That perception is rooted in a century of reality. The tribe only owns roughly 27,000 acres of its 120,000-acre reservation, after U.S. government actions directly or indirectly led its farmland to pass into non-Native hands— mostly white farmers.

But that reality is starting to change. In the past five years, three Nebraska tribes—the Winnebago, the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska and the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska—have bought a combined 3,000-odd acres of farmland that was once theirs.