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Published on November 1, 2021, this feature service depicts American Indian Off-Reservation Trust Land areas in the lower 48 states. The areas include all Off-Reservation Trust Lands associated with Federally recognized tribal entities. These national-scale boundaries and locations for federally recognized tribes based on the Agency’s current interpretation of the EPA 1984 Indian Policy per EPA’s American Indian Environmental Office (AIEO). The associated dataset contains information on six tribal categories: Alaska Native Allotments, Alaska Native Villages, American Indian Reservations, American Indian Off-reservation Trust Lands, Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Areas, and Virginia Federally Recognized Tribes. For each tribal category, EPA standardized and enhanced data fields to best meet Agency needs and use cases as they relate to the EPA 1984 Indian Policy and the EPA Tribal Identification Data Standard. This dataset’s design is based on the FGDC Cadastral Content Data Standard with corner positions derived by geodetic calculations using measurement records. To the extent possible, coordinate-boundaries or locations were unmodified. In some cases, however, closure and edge-matching were necessary to produce a seamless dataset. Therefore, features may not preserve the original geometry of survey measurements. Nevertheless, record measurements are reported as attributes.
Locations for Alaska Native Villages and Alaska Native Allotments were collected from the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), Bureau of Land Management (BLM) as updated in on January 1, 2010 (EPA Update: July 28, 2021) and November 9, 2019, respectively. Alaska Native Villages are presented as boundary centroid points based on selected and conveyed land boundaries provided by the BLM Alaska State Office. Data on Alaska Native Allotments were generated by BLM from land survey records associated with the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) in Alaska (view here), specifically the BLM_AK_Native_Allotment_Convey.shp file.
Boundaries for both American Indian Reservations, American Indian Off-reservation Trust Lands, and Oklahoma Statistical Areas were collected from the U.S. Department of Commerce (USDOC), U.S. Bureau of the Census (Census Bureau). Originally reported by federally recognized tribal governments, these boundaries were updated on January 1, 2020 through the Boundary and Annexation Survey (BAS). More information on these and other tribal boundaries is available from the Census Bureau. Virginia Federally Recognized Tribes contains point data for tribes geographically located in the state of Virginia, corresponding with the administrative boundaries of EPA Region 3. These tribes are federally recognized, but do not currently have land in federal status. Locations are based on mailing addresses for each tribe provided by the EPA Region 3 Tribal Program Coordinator to the US EPA Office of Mission Support on May 5, 2021.
Of these tribal entities, Alaska Native Villages, Alaska Native Allotments, American Indian Reservations and American Indian Off-reservation Trust Lands represent legal entities. In context, “legal entities” does not speak to the legal status of feature class boundaries associated with these data. They do not constitute a determination of jurisdictional authority or rights of ownership or entitlement and are not legal land descriptions. These data may only be used for statistical collection and tabulation purposes. Oklahoma Tribal Statistical Areas are considered statistical entities, meaning that they are collected for statistical or tabulation purposes. Note that due to a recent Supreme Court decision, Oklahoma Indian country boundaries are in a state of flux. Changes will be incorporated in future dataset iterations.
Additional tribal boundary records have been added to the Shared Enterprise Geodata and Services (SEGS) collection to assist in analyzing other areas of interest for specific purposes or focusing on specific groups that may be of interest in environmental decision-making. These additional layers include: Hawaiian Native Homelands, Alaska Native Regional Corporations, State-recognized American Indian Reservations, and USFS Tribal Cession Boundaries.
Regarding the latter, USFS Tribal Cession Boundaries depict lands tribes have ceded to the federal government for which they may still retain rights covered by treaties and may not be present-day tribal boundaries. In December 2014, EPA Administrator McCarthy released a Memorandum commemorating the 30th anniversary of EPA’s Indian Policy which stated: “While treaties do not expand the EPA' s authority, the EPA must ensure its actions do not conflict with tribal treaty rights. In addition, EPA programs should be implemented to enhance protection of tribal treaty rights and treaty-covered resources when we have discretion to do so.” Therefore, Tribal Cession Boundaries may be considered when EPA’s proposed decision or action is focused on a specific geographic area, and EPA’s proposed decision or action may affect a tribal treaty right relating to a natural resource, or EPA’s proposed decision or action may affect an environmental condition necessary to support the natural resource. Current guidance acknowledges that EPA’s next step may be to conduct legal and policy analysis in order to determine how to protect the treaty rights, seek additional consultation with affected tribes, and/or coordinate with other federal Agencies. This guidance does not create any new legal obligations for EPA; expand the authorities granted by EPA’s underlying statutes; alter or diminish any existing EPA treaty responsibility; or address other treaty rights provisions such as tribal jurisdiction or reservation boundaries.
Please note that the EPA makes no claims regarding either the spatial accuracy or precision of these data as associated boundaries and coordinate locations were delineated by the U.S. federal agencies annotated in this metadata record. Data users are encouraged to carefully reference the metadata provided by these federal agencies before using this service. These data are not better than the sources from which they were derived, and both scale and accuracy may vary across the dataset. These data are neither legal documents nor land surveys and must not be used as such. This information cannot be relied upon to create any rights, substantive or procedural, enforceable by any party in litigation with the United States or third parties. EPA reserves the right to change this dataset at any time without public notice.