FINDINGS.

SEC. 101. FINDINGS. Congress finds that— (1) in the 1800’s and early 1900’s, the United States sought to assimilate Indian people into the surrounding non-Indian culture by allotting tribal lands to individual members of Indian tribes; (2) as a result of the allotment Acts and related Federal policies, over 90,000,000 acres of land have passed from tribal ownership; (3) many trust allotments were taken out of trust status, often without their owner’s consent; (4) without restrictions on alienation, allotment owners were subject to exploitation and their allotments were often sold or disposed of without any tangible or enduring benefit to their owners; (5) the trust periods for trust allotments have been extended indefinitely; (6) because of the inheritance provisions in the original treaties or allotment Acts, the ownership of many of the trust allotments that have remained in trust status has become fractionated into hundreds or thousands of undivided interests, many of which represent 2 percent or less of the total interests; (7) Congress has authorized the acquisition of lands in trust for individual Indians, and many of those lands have also become fractionated by subsequent inheritance; (8) the acquisitions referred to in paragraph (7) continue to be made; (9) the fractional interests described in this section often provide little or no return to the beneficial owners of those interests and the administrative costs borne by the United States for those interests are inordinately high; (10) in Babbitt v. Youpee (117 S Ct. 727 (1997)), the United States Supreme Court found the application of section 207 114 STAT. 1992of the Indian Land Consolidation Act (25 U.S.C. 2206) to the facts presented in that case to be unconstitutional, forcing the Department of the Interior to address the status of thousands of undivided interests in trust and restricted lands; (11)(A) on February 19, 1999, the Secretary of the Interior issued a Secretarial Order which officially reopened the probate of all estates where an interest in land was ordered to escheat to an Indian tribe pursuant to section 207 of the Indian Land Consolidation Act (25 U.S.C. 2206); and (B) the Secretarial Order also directed appropriate officials of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to distribute such interests “to the rightful heirs and beneficiaries without regard to 25 U.S.C. 2206”; (12) in the absence of comprehensive remedial legislation, the number of the fractional interests will continue to grow exponentially; (13) the problem of the fractionation of Indian lands described in this section is the result of a policy of the Federal Government, cannot be solved by Indian tribes, and requires a solution under Federal law. (14) any devise or inheritance of an interest in trust or restricted Indian lands is a matter of Federal law; and (15) consistent with the Federal policy of tribal self-determination, the Federal Government should encourage the recognized tribal government that exercises jurisdiction over a reservation to establish a tribal probate code for that reservation.